Camus was a goalie
Simon Barnes
IT is the most ancient and enduring principle in football that goalkeepers are crazy. And it's true — the people who take on the most difficult and responsible role in the game do rather tend, to use a useful Australianism, to have a kangaroo loose in the top paddock.
Talent as a goalkeeper doesn't come in a safe'n'solid kind of way. If you can stop point-blank headers and turn top-corner volleys round the post. then you are likely to have all kinds of little lunacies as well.
Manchester United built much of their success on the brilliant Peter Schmeichel, whose game was based on Fawlty-esque rage. His response to just about anything that happened on the pitch was a hydrophobic, mouth-frothing fury. When he conceded a goal he suffered no anguish; his response was always uncontrollable anger.
Manchester United's current incumbent is Fabien Barthez, who won the World Cup with France three years ago, and is perhaps the best in the world. He was one of the major acquisitions that was going to put the side light-years ahead of the opposition. Instead, Barthez, a player of massive talent, has become a character in a Feydeau farce.
Last weekend, when it seemed that his crisis-torn side was at last getting some kind of result against their principal rivals, Arsenal. Barthez gave away a pair of richly comic goals: United lost, and so the crisis continues.
Barthez is from the look-at-me-I'm-crazy school of goalkeeping. He had a notable predecessor in Bruce Grobbelaar, who loved attention, kept goal with a wonderful, lithe athleticism, made spectacular errors, and was eventually found guilty of taking bribes.
This tradition is most often found in South America, where every goalkeeper must be a stand-up-and-he-counted eccentric. They always play miles out of their goals and dribble the bail round attackers in their own penalty areas. Jose-Marie Chilavert regularly scores goals from free kicks and penalties. No one will forget Rene Higuita's 'scorpion kick' at Wembley, when he cleared the ball from his goalmouth by diving at it headfirst and slamming it upfield with his heels.
If goalkeepers are not mad extroverts, they tend to be big, gloomy neurotics. Peter
Shilton, a wonderful goalkeeper for England, was the classic rock-solid type. He relieved the pressure on himself by making a horribly depressing mess of real life.
Goalkeeping is not a role that attracts normal people. You have to be a bit peculiar if you choose to play a team game and go for the one position that allows you to wear a different outfit from anybody else.
Goalkeepers, quite literally, live by different rules. They have quite different skills and play the game with a different mindset. Albert Camus was a goalkeeper: perhaps all goalkeepers are at heart existentialists, conscious that, in a world of camaraderie and shared purpose, they are at base alone.
Goalkeepers actively seek the world's contempt, deliberately seeking to excel in the position normally given to the fat kid in the playground. They know that every mistake is a calamity. A footballer, an outfielder, a normal person, can make a thousand errors, but they don't matter. A goalkeeper holds catastrophe in the palm of his gloves.
Goalkeepers are the cheapest players to buy on the transfer market, the least likely to win man-of-the-match. Few managers and fewer pundits understand a goalkeeper's art. And, speaking as a lapsed goalkeeper, we wouldn't want it any other way.
Previous page
