On This Day in 1984, Coker Scored Twice to Help the US Advance to the Final Round of World Cup Qualifying
The scoreless draw in Curaçao should have felt like a minor victory—a road point secured against Caribbean winds and a hostile crowd of 6,109 in the first leg of the qualifying round for the 1985 CONCACAF Championship. Instead, it hung over the American camp like a dark cloud. Rick Davis and Bruce Savage had struck iron in the first half, their shots clanging off the crossbar with the hollow sound of missed opportunity. Chico Borja thought he'd broken through after the break, only to see the linesman's flag erase what might have been the goal that settled everything.
The away-goals rule transformed mathematics into psychology: in St. Louis, the Americans couldn't settle for another 0-0. They had to win, or endure thirty minutes of tense overtime, followed by the lottery of penalty kicks, to decide whether their World Cup dream would continue or die on home soil. "We came here not to lose, and that's what happened," Davis said afterward, the pragmatism unable to mask the disappointment. "But we did not play our best." Alkis Panagoulias, ever the realist masquerading as an optimist, framed it simply: "We are happy to get the tie. We now hope to win it in St. Louis."
Hope. That word carried weight as the team arrived at Busch Stadium on October 6, where NBC's experimental Skycam would hover over the proceedings like a mechanical vulture, its aerial view promising either triumph or disaster to a delayed-tape audience. The network had secured approvals from FIFA, the U.S. Soccer Federation, and Netherlands Antilles officials, promising "judicious" use after the contraption had crashed into a goalpost during football exhibitions. The American players, already under sufficient pressure, now had literal scrutiny hanging over them.
Then came the passport.
Steve Moyers—the team's most dangerous striker, the St. Louis native who had waited seven years to play before his parents and the 200 friends they'd invited—stood in the bowels of Busch Stadium with despair in his eyes as teammates were introduced. His passport sat in a gym bag in New Jersey, a leather pamphlet worth a thousand miles of heartbreak. FIFA's rules were immovable: no passport, no proof of citizenship, no match. A driver's license wouldn't suffice. The previous week's roster sheet meant nothing. An emergency phone call from his girlfriend's aunt, who'd found the document while frantically searching his apartment, only made the knife twist deeper.
"This is the pride and joy of soccer when you play in front of your parents and friends with the colors on your jersey," Moyers said, his voice carrying the weight of an opportunity that would never return. "I felt sorry for my parents, and I apologize to the other players."
The morning had already delivered rain. Now it delivered institutional failure wrapped in personal responsibility. "We can't have things like this happening to us," Panagoulias fumed, his anger directed at systems rather than the player. "We have to be serious in this business so we can survive internationally."
By the time 12,436 spectators settled into their seats beneath gray skies, the Americans were playing without their sharpest sword, forced to reimagine their attack on the fly. The first half unfolded like a cruel reenactment of Curaçao—American pressure meeting stubborn resistance, quality chances dying on the boot or in the hands of Netherlands Antilles goalkeeper Jozef Nivallac. The keeper had been magnificent in the first match and remained so now, denying shot after shot as the clock became an adversary.
"The longer we went without a goal, the more the pressure built up," goalkeeper David Brcic would recall, understanding the stakes. "It would have been heartbreaking to lose at this stage of the competition, and it would have been detrimental to the future of U.S. soccer."
Two interventions shifted the balance. The first was tactical: Panagoulias replaced starter Chance Fry with Ade Coker 23 minutes in, the substitution injecting urgency into an attack searching for solutions. Coker nearly scored twice before halftime, his movement causing problems the Netherlands Antilles couldn't quite solve. The second intervention was disciplinary. Five minutes before the break, Errol St. Jago made a decision that would haunt his teammates for the remainder of the afternoon. Away from the ball, he drove an elbow into Jeff Durgan's face, the defender crumpling five yards from linesman Rob Allen. The red card came immediately, leaving the visitors to defend their scoreless draw with ten men for the entire second half.
"I really don't know why it happened," Durgan said later, still processing the violence. "But suddenly he put his elbow in my mouth. He did it in the worst possible place."
The Americans believed they would have prevailed regardless—"it was just a matter of time" became the locker room refrain at halftime—but the numerical advantage should have made the second 45 minutes straightforward. Instead, they walked back onto the field and immediately squandered a gift. Three minutes into the half, Dan Canter stepped to the penalty spot with a chance to break the deadlock. His shot struck the post, the metallic clang echoing through Busch Stadium like a curse taking hold.
"It almost seemed that a hex was being put on us," Davis would say, cataloging the morning's rain, Moyers's absence, and now Canter's miss as evidence of cosmic conspiracy.
The hex lasted exactly three minutes. Davis sent a corner kick from the right side, intending to find defender Kevin Crow in the forest of bodies. Instead, the ball found Angelo DiBernardo on the left edge of the penalty area. The New York Cosmos midfielder controlled it with his head, then unleashed a left-footed strike from twenty-two yards that screamed into the upper corner, giving Nivallac no chance despite his desperate dive.
50 minutes into the match, the floodgates Coker had predicted finally opened. The flags came out en masse, the cannons fired, and the pressure that had been building since Curaçao released in a roar that might have registered on NBC's Skycam hovering somewhere overhead.
"When we didn't score on the penalty kick, I was beginning to think it wasn't our day," DiBernardo admitted. "But then getting that goal that quickly really helped us."
It devastated the Netherlands Antilles. Five minutes later, Edsel Neuman received his second yellow card and followed St. Jago to the showers, leaving the visitors to defend with nine men against eleven. The mathematics became brutal. Three minutes after Neuman's ejection, Davis broke down the right sideline, his cross deflecting off an Antilles defender. Borja collected it and fed Coker, who hammered a shot beneath the crossbar to make it 2-0.
The game had become a procession. At the 68-minute mark, Borja and Coker combined again, the forward finishing from five yards after another precise feed. The Americans outshot the Netherlands Antilles 17-to-1 in the second half, the disparity telling the story of nine men trying to hold back a flood with their hands.
"After their players were ejected, it gave the midfielders a lot more area to work with," DiBernardo explained, though the clinical assessment couldn't fully capture the relief washing over the American bench. "Our passes then started to work."
Erhardt Kapp added the final goal five minutes from time, knocking home a rebound during a goalmouth scramble to complete the 4-0 rout. The score flattered American dominance without quite capturing the anxiety that had preceded it—the nervy first half, the missed penalty, the sense that one more mistake might send everything spiraling.
Before the match, five St. Louis legends from the 1950 World Cup team that had shocked England stood on the field to receive recognition: Bob Annis, Frank Borghi, Charley Colombo, Harry Keough, and Gino Pariani. They represented the last time American soccer had truly mattered on the world stage, and their presence served as both an inspiration and a reminder of how rarely such opportunities arose.
Now the current generation had secured passage to the second round, where Trinidad & Tobago and Costa Rica awaited in a round-robin format. The winner would advance to yet another group stage, each step bringing the 1986 Mexico World Cup into sharper focus. The Americans would travel to Trinidad on October 20, carrying momentum built on second-half dominance and the memory of how close they'd come to disaster.
The game ended with a third Netherlands Antilles player—Sherman Fonseca—earning ejection for elbowing Durgan, as if to emphasize the visitors' afternoon of indiscipline. U.S. Soccer Federation President Werner Fricker announced plans for a National Team administrator to prevent future passport debacles. Panagoulias spoke of needing to "overcome our own mistakes" to survive internationally.
But for Coker, who'd seized Moyers's absent role and delivered two goals, the victory validated something beyond tactics or discipline. The floodgates had opened. The hex, if it ever existed, had lifted. American soccer was still alive, still dreaming, still marching toward Mexico with the conviction that this time—finally—they belonged among the world's best. The rain that had fallen that morning seemed a lifetime ago by the time the final whistle blew, washed away by four goals and the promise of what might come next in the Caribbean heat of Trinidad.
