Cabo Verde's Vozinha was amazing but was he the best goalkeeper at the 2026 World Cup on Monday - or was Saudi Arabia's Mohammed Al-Owais better?

The tears that ran down the face of Vozinha after his team's historic 0-0 draw with Spain on their World Cup debut spoke a thousand words.

Vozinha, who turned 40 just before the tournament started, had just become the oldest man to ever keep a clean sheet on his debut at the World Cup.

"Today our dream came true by competing against a team like Spain. I am very proud of all the people involved in that process," Vozinha said after the game.

"I cried after the game because I grew up with my grandparents when I was a kid, and they could not be there. They passed away a few years ago. My mum could not be here either because of a visa issue, and the money we had to pay for it. We did not manage to do this in time.

"We work in life to have moments like this. I am 40 now but I was not a professional up until I was 25. This is a reward for all this journey."

Vozinha made seven fine saves, with one particularly standing out as he reacted to a second effort from Mikel Oyarzabal to tip the ball over the crossbar after it had crashed off the woodwork from Ferran Torres.

It feels impossible to overstate the level of achievement for a team like Cabo Verde - a nation with a population of just over 500,000, at their first ever World Cup game - to keep out the defending European champions and one of the favourites for the tournament.

But is it possible that we actually saw an even better goalkeeping performance later in the evening?

In the third game on Monday, Saudi Arabia were also forced to dig deep as they faced an onslaught from Uruguay in their opening game.

After taking a little while to get going, Uruguay had an astonishing 22 shots in the second-half, which is the most by any team at a World Cup in a single half since 1974, per Opta.

Yet they were consistently denied by one man, goalkeeper Mohammed Al-Owais, who was only beaten right at the end by Maxi Araujo on a follow-up effort.

Al-Owais made nine saves, two more than Vozinha and more than any other keeper has made so far during this tournament. It

As surprising as it seems, there are actually some parallels between the pair both on and off the field.

On the field, both had one signature save during their respective games. We already mentioned Vozinha's one to deny Oyarzabal but Al-Owais' late diving stop to his left to tip Federico Valverde's low drive around the post was arguably even more impressive.

Off the field, both play for second division clubs, Al-Owais with Al-Ula in Saudi Arabia and Vozinha with Chaves.

But that doesn't help us work out who had the better game. So we asked our friends at Opta for the numbers around their performances. Here they are below with where said stat ranks for keepers at this World Cup.

A pretty fair spread across the board, as you can see.

Now the caveat here is that goal prevention is still a bit of a flawed metric because of the way it is judged based on what the striker should do. ie, if a striker misses an easy chance, but the keeper only makes a routine save the keeper will still benefit a lot. Ultimately, it is still too hard for the numbers to accurately judge goalkeepers.

What goes in Al-Owais' favour is that objectively, he made saves that were of a higher quality, even aside from the Valverde effort. A number of the saves Vozinha made were ones you would expect him to make.

However - in another unquantifiable metric - there was arguably more pressure on Vozinha's shoulders.

He was facing a better team in the first World Cup game for his country, and they had a chance to get a result in their very first bow. Not to mention some of the off-field pressure he spoke about in his interview such as the issue with his mother's visa.

On the other hand, Al-Owais has actually been here before. Four years ago in Qatar, he also made nine saves against Mexico, having already made five in his team's historic win over eventual champions Argentina.

So which performance did you think was better? Are you swayed by the technical superiority of what Al-Owais did or are you a romantic who believes that Vozinha's was better for everything it involved?

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