The life and career of Leigh Roose, a Welsh goalkeeper in the 1900s, was brief but eventful. A medical student before the passion between the sticks took over, the story goes that he used to sit on the crossbar waiting for the corner to be taken; he used to tiptoe on the crossbar when the ball was at the one other end of the pitch; he once missed a train and so hired an entire carriage for himself to reach the ground on time; Daily Mail named him as London’s second most eligible bachelor, after the cricketer Jack Hobbs, in 1912. A favourite of the ladies, he was killed in the Battle of Somme during the first world war but reportedly after “putting good use of his strong arm by raining grenades at the enemy”.
An infuriatingly flamboyant keeper, one of his maneuvers forced an amendment of goalkeeping laws. Until 1870, there was no specialist goalkeeper. Anyone could catch the ball, though not carry it. But in 1870, it was modified, as “‘the goalkeeper may, within his own half of the field of play, use his hands, but shall not carry the ball.’ Roose found a loophole in this, and in one game against Sunderland, he bounced the ball to the halfway line like a basket-baller, beating the opponents en route. Least to say, it did not please his adversaries and they lodged a complaint to the FA. No immediate action was apparently taken. Roose continued to dribble the ball like a basket-baller, but after his retirement in 1912, the rule-makers made this landmark ruling, “The goalkeeper may, within his own penalty area, use his hands, but shall not carry the ball.”
This is how goalkeeping rules have evolved over the years, as a reaction to a goalkeeper’s ingenuity, (or shrewd manipulation of laws).
Goalkeepers have, broadly speaking, been the most frequent victims of amendments to the Laws of the Game. After the position was formally introduced in 1870, they more or less ran free, until gradual changes began to gnaw away at their privileges. In 1873, they were no longer allowed to carry the ball upfield; in 1887 they were banned from handling it in the opposition half and finally, in 1912, they were permitted only to handle the ball inside their own penalty area, and in 2000 they could no longer hold the ball for more than six seconds for a goal kick.
The latest tweak, constituted in March and effective from this month, takes another entitlement away. It states that “the defending goalkeeper must remain on the goal line, facing the kicker, between the goalposts, without touching the goalposts, crossbar or goal net, until the ball is kicked.”
Besides,“the goalkeeper must not behave in a manner that fails to show respect for the game and the opponent, i.e. by unfairly distracting the kicker.”
It implies that goalkeepers could no longer spread their arms before the kick so as to make the target area look smaller, to sow confusion as where to strike the ball and how to strike the ball. They cannot practice the common ritual of touching the posts before they brace for the shot, they cannot delay the execution of the kick, and most significantly, they can’t indulge in shenanigans. How would Andrew Redmayne, whose wobble-limbed antics, helped Australia beat Peru in the World Cup playoff, take this?
Restricting freedom
Most certainly, referees should ensure that goalkeepers, or any player on the field, should not cross the line of sportsmanship. But in cruelly restricting their freedom of movement, they are moulding human robots out of them. The goalpost itself is a cage; and now they would feel even more caged. The word “distraction” though is so ambiguous and indefinite that goalkeepers would certainly find a way around it.
On the contrary, no one is preventing the penalty-taker from stuttering or stopping in his run-up, or delaying the shot, or playing tricks with the eye and body. He could be an equally distracting, disrupting entity as well. He could play mind-games too.
It’s apparently the actions of Argentina’s mercurial goal-keeper Emiliano Martinez’s theatrics in the COPA America semifinal against Colombia as well as the World Cup final encounter against France that prompted the hasty stitching up of the clause. He would subject each opposition penalty taker to a barrage of trash talk.
At the World Cup, apart from the regular verbal barrage, he would rather than handing the ball to the taker, would toss it to one side, forcing an unwanted detour to reach the penalty spot. He was brandished a card, but he remained uninhibited. Neither did the implementation of the new rules bother him “I already saved the penalties that I had to save,” he dismissed with his characteristic dismissiveness.
Thankless role
Some of his contemporaries would feel condemned. As such, the occupation is as torturous and thankless, remembered for one mistake and forgotten for a thousand saves, even though a save could be worth as much as a goal. In a sense, their careers are spent operating on the edge of failure.
In contrast with their team-mates, goalkeepers cannot make amends for their mistakes by going up to the other end and scoring, apart from a few exceptions. Commit an error and expect to be pulled apart by both public and pundits.
Even a so-called quiet day could take its toll on them, Kasper Schmeichel had once put the reality in perspective: “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.”
There are other perils and hazards. A lone mistimed tackle or a foul could concede a penalty., worse could end their night, could incite a long suspension. Skulls and elbows could clatter into your chest and head, you could fall most awkwardly, you could clang your head against the post. Even the balls are designed to enhance the cutting edge of goal-scorers. They are quicker than ever before, they are prone to swerving more alarmingly too. Little wonder then that one of the finest net-minders in the game, Gianluigi Buffon, feels that “in the end, you need to be a little masochistic to be a goalkeeper.”
“A masochist and egocentric as well. A masochist because when you play in goal, you know the only certain thing in life is that you will concede goals. And you also know that conceding goals is not something that brings you happiness,” he once told The Guardian.
So he advises the wannabe goalkeepers. “Change. Don’t be a keeper.’ Until his teenage years, Buffon wanted to be a goal-keeping midfielder like his idols Marco Tardelli and Nicola Berti. But Italia 1990 changed it all. Cameron’s goalkeeper Thomas N’Kono, who would bound out of the six-yard box in grey and yellow striped shirt and black trousers and thunder the ball upfield, enthused him.
Buffon emerged as one of the finest, yet he never won a Ballon d’Or. In fact, Lev Yashin remains the only goalkeeper ever to have won the award. During the transfer, they are always the bargain buys. They are transferred for less and paid less. Only two goalkeepers have ever commanded a fee in excess of 50 million pounds, Chelsea’s Kepa Arrizabalaga and Liverpool’s Alisson Becker. They don’t earn as much as others, even if their roles are diversifying, they are expected to initiate the play, to play-make, use their feet with as much expertise as they use their hands. Treble-winning Manchester City’s first-choice keeper gets £100,000 pounds a week, but is the fifteenth highest earner in the squad. The best paid goalkeeper was Manchester United’s David de Ge (£375,000-a-week) but he is not even in the top 15. Only nine keepers in the world have a weekly wage more £150,000 pounds.
Little wonder then that goalkeepers tend to be eccentric, prone to showmanship and eccentricities. But one by one, the colour is being taken away from them. From Roose to Buffon, Yashin to Ederson, they would feel condemned to the edges of the game.
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