We’re told that goalkeepers are different. It’s a position for eccentrics. Perhaps that is why our knowledge of the keeper’s role is so poor. Rich Lee, a goalkeeper best known for his spells at Watford and Brentford, wants to change that. His Twitter bio reads: “Man on a mission to banish the term ‘wrong hand’ from a pundit’s glossary.”
“My biggest frustration is that the punditry you hear is often misguided,” says Lee. “I don’t just want to pile in, but it’s D grade, E grade stuff.” Lee’s fundamental issue is that we are framing the position incorrectly. From the sidelines it’s easy to consider the role of a goalkeeper is a wholly reactive one. A shot is taken, a goalkeeper saves it. A cross comes in, a goalkeeper catches it. Their careers are spent operating on the edge of failure, and success is simply maintaining the status quo.
However, Lee speaks of goalkeeping in proactive terms – the primary role is to prevent opportunities from occurring, not to save them after the fact. “If you’re a top goalkeeper your level of communication is so high that you are effectively orchestrating what’s going on in front of you, as you’re seeing things before they happen. You’re seeing runners, potential through balls – your starting position is so good that you’re cutting things out at source.”
Kasper Schmeichel agrees, saying on the High Performance podcast that his best games are the ones where he goes unnoticed. “The morning after the game people get a grade out of 10,” explains Lee. “I might look at it and think: that’s a 10 out of 10. Communication was fantastic, great starting positions, aggressive in everything they did, assertive with their back four. And I wake up the next day and they’ve got a six because they’ve not made that great save. You’re being graded on a completely different model.
“There are thousands of things that go into a clean sheet. And the amount of times I’ve come off the pitch, not having made a save, but having had a throbbing headache because you concentrated like you’ve never concentrated before. Continually talking, guiding. And that one’s a real cliché like: ‘Oh quiet day for him today, the perfect game’, but they don’t fully appreciate the intricacies of goalkeeping.”
It’s like the difference between a babysitter and a parent. From the outside, we look at the goalkeeper as a player who sweeps up any mess and is there just in case something goes wrong. This is part of their job but their primary role is to guide the team along the way. Navigating trouble, constantly communicating and inspiring confidence in those around them. Sure, they’ll be there to kiss it better if you fall and scrape your knee, but they’ll also ask why you were there in the first place and, crucially, make sure you don’t do it again.
A common criticism of Lee and other goalkeeping experts is that they are too soft and concerned about condemning a fellow member of the goalkeepers’ union. Lee admits there is an element of that. In an environment that is already stacked against the keeper, he sees little sense in adding yet another critical voice and is irked by those who criticise when they are not qualified to do so.
And there are, of course, limitations to the idea that a quiet game is a good game. No keeper walks off after a 6-0 win and claims they were pivotal to the result. However, once you realise the position is proactive rather than reactive, you begin to understand the frustrations keepers have about misconceptions in other areas of their game.
One example is the throwaway line that a shot has “just hit him”. Well, why has it hit him? Keepers are card counters forever working to tip the odds in their favour. They may not be able to make the striker miss, but they can force him to be perfect to score. Lee says a goalkeeper’s job is to maintain their “maximum position” throughout the 90 minutes. “You mention the cliché of ‘it’s just hit him’. Well, of course it’s just hit him, but it’s hit him because he’s put himself in a position that’s given him the greatest probability of making a save. That’s what goalkeeping is about: probability. You can’t know where the ball is going to go but you can put yourself in the best position according to percentages of what’s happened previously.
“For a block save there’s a lot of movement that’s involved in getting yourself in the right position, then getting yourself within a couple of yards of the striker and then creating a barrier that’s as big as it can possibly be to minimise the amount of goal that a striker can aim at. That in itself is so many different decisions that if it does ‘hit you’, you’ve made it hit you.
What about more athletic saves, where a keeper has to dive to cover the width of their goal? “Even that is a decision. Cross comes in – OK – retreat to your line so you have maximum reaction time, then what power have you got in your legs? Have you done your plyometric training in the gym in the weeks prior? Can you get that step in? Are you able to explode off the left leg to get into the top corner? That’s those 15-20 years of training that will allow you that fingertip on to the post.” The theme running through everything Lee says is that goalkeeping is a combination of mental endurance and moments of physical explosion.
In cricket, there’s a phenomenon that wicketkeepers deal with known as “wobble”. It occurs in the time between the ball passing the bat and reaching the keeper, when the ball stops rotating in the air, and as a result develops a mind of its own, wobbling all over the place. It makes wicketkeepers look stupid, regularly. However, when it happens to a wicketkeeper, all it means is maybe four byes added to a total measured in 100s. For a goalkeeper experiencing the same problem, it can result in the one goal in a game that finishes 1-0.
Perhaps the relatively low stakes in cricket mean it is just accepted that the ball will behave bizarrely at times and the wicketkeeper will be helpless. It therefore seems unfair that in football, where the consequences are potentially match-defining, goalkeepers are not afforded that same understanding. An example of this occurred last season, when Harry Kane scored from long range against Crystal Palace keeper Vicente Guaita. Undoubtedly, Guaita looked silly. Kane was the best part of 30 yards out and still his shot went in, in the middle of the goal.
How? An angle from behind the goal should have explained it all. The shot is struck to Guaita’s right, leading him to shift his weight in that direction, only for it to snap back the other way, leaving him helpless. The wobble of the ball meant it had effectively taken a deflection about 10 yards away from him. In normal circumstances a deflection excuses the keeper from responsibility. But in this case, as it was just the ball’s natural (or unnatural) movement, Guaita was deemed at fault. Lee spoke about this goal on his podcast, Goalkeeper’s Union, and came to Guaita’s defence. “I watched it and straight away I was like: he’s got no chance. They’ve seen it behind and I was thinking please, come on, someone must pick up on that. And no one does.”
Another mistake pundits make it to focus on a goalkeeper’s mistakes rather than their overall contribution to a team’s result. “One of the classic ways for me is crosses,” explains Lee. “If you come for 10 crosses, you catch nine, but miss one and they score. People remember the one that you miss; they don’t remember the nine. And all of a sudden that becomes a mistake against your name. But if you don’t come for any of the crosses, the chances are that some might question why you didn’t come, but most won’t. So you end up getting blamed for zero, even though you may concede four or five. There will be tiny examples in games where – and I can only sense this because I’ve been there myself – there are positions you might take that weren’t the most effective, but effectively you were hiding. But no one picks up on it.”
This is why we need specialist goalkeeping pundits. By drawing conclusions on goalkeepers based on individual moments of brilliance or disaster, we are judging them on the swan gliding on the water, but only those who understand what they are seeing can appreciate all the work going on underneath. Overall, it leaves the world of goalkeeping punditry in an unsatisfactory place of hyper-criticism from the mainstream and over-the-top defence from the knowledgeable.
Fans are desperate for as much information and insight about football as possible – TV companies are even bringing in referees such as Peter Walton to assess officiating decisions – yet there’s a scarcity of coverage about one of the most pivotal roles in the game. The tide is potentially turning. Rob Green is appearing on our screens more regularly and there seems to be an increasing appetite for former keepers such as Lee and David Preece to provide insight. Whether we listen to them, however, remains to be seen. They are eccentrics after all.
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