“I had a dream,” Oleg Salenko excitedly told his room-mate upon awaking in a California hotel. “I’m going to score lots of goals, we’re going to thrash Cameroon, and we’re going to reach the final.” Dmitri Radchenko felt his long-time friend “needed admitting to a mental asylum”.
Oleg Salenko had just two caps going into 1994, began that year’s FIFA World Cup on the bench, and never played international football after it. Russia needed to thrash Cameroon, who had been minutes away from reaching the Italia ’۹۰ semi-finals and whose players were on a big bonus to win their final Group B game, and watch other results go their way to reach the knockout phase.
Yet two of Salenko’s premonitions proved fact over fantasy. One was even wilder than his concoction. Ernst Wilimowski, Ademir de Menezes, Sandor Kocsis, Just Fontaine, Eusebio and Emilio Butragueno shared the record for most goals in a World Cup game. They would no longer after 75 minutes at Stanford Stadium. That was when Salenko dinked home his fifth goal – all from his right boot – to inspire a 6-1 victory.
“I didn’t know it was a record at the time,” said Salenko years later. “I heard something over the loud speaker, but I was concentrated on us winning by as many goals as possible, it was in English, and I wasn’t quite sure what it was.
“There are records for this, that and everything. I couldn’t have possibly imagined I’d set a record for the most goals in a World Cup game.
“Right after full-time me and Dmitri got taken for doping. The match kicked off at 1pm and it was 40 C. We were unbelievably dehydrated and waited an hour-and-a-half to give a urine sample.
“I only found out hours later that it was a prestigious record for the most goals in a World Cup game. It was obviously amazing, but at the time I was really anxious to see if we would go through.”
The thumping victory left Russia with three shots at reaching the knockout phase. All, improbably, proved futile. First, Saudi Arabia stunned Belgium, then Bulgaria upset Argentina, and finally Nigeria sunk Greece. The Eastern Europeans were out.
“It was only afterwards that I began to appreciate the record,” said Salenko. “You look at those great strikers who scored four goals in a [World Cup] game. You consider that legends like Pele, [Gerd] Muller and [Paolo] Rossi didn’t even manage that.
“Scoring five a game is something I’m very proud of. That’s the beauty of the World Cup – the whole world is watching. If you do something spectacular, you’ll be remembered forever. I still get people from all over the world coming up to me to talk about it.”
Salenko’s final strike past Jacques Songo’o left him on six goals at USA ’۹۴ – he was also Russia’s solitary marksman in a 3-1 defeat to a Martin Dahlin-inspired Sweden – only for Hristo Stoichkov to net four times thereafter and tie his total. It meant the Russian and the Bulgarian shared the adidas Golden Boot, and that the former is, remarkably, the only man to have claimed it without playing in the knockout rounds.
“It was an honour to share the Golden Boot with such a great player,” said Salenko. “We’ve bumped into each other several times. He was at Barcelona and I was at Valencia. He’d joke that I should be grateful he didn’t score one more, and I’d joke that he should be grateful I passed to ‘Dimka’ rather than scoring myself against Cameroon!”
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