It’s all your fault. That is what goalkeeping is all about. And as an English spectator, a human being and a paid-up member of the Lapsed Goalkeepers’ Union, I feel tremendously sorry for Robert Green. Who would not? But I am equally — and rightly — inclined to blame him.
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I would have been horrified to make so terrible an error myself. Mind you, I’ve made plenty worse (and been horrified). (Though not as much as my team-mates). But that’s why you’re a goalkeeper, because you are prepared to accept blame. A goalkeeper makes a contract with the game. Glory: very, very seldom. Blame: every game.
And that’s why goalkeepers are different, that’s why goalkeepers are crazy, that’s why goalkeepers are singular fellows. Don’t ask me, ask the great goalkeepers of history, people such as Albert Camus, Vladimir Nabokov, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Julio Iglesias, Pope John Paul II, Che Guevara. Singular fellows all.
Goalkeeping is not just about a talent for handball, a liking for diving about and a taste for being in a team yet wearing a different outfit. It’s the taste for blame. And the higher you rise, the greater the blame. You will be blamed when it’s your fault, you will be blamed when it isn’t. Alas, poor Green, he earned every scrap, but what about Paul Robinson? He was goalkeeper when England lost to Croatia a couple of years ago. He missed a back pass and the resulting blame has affected him since.
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We are left wondering about the England manager, Fabio Capello, who selected Green after a great deal of shilly shallying. His judgment was shown to be wrong. And what did he do in his post-match interview? Blamed the goalie, what else?
But let’s leave the last word with Nabokov: “I was less the keeper of a soccer goal than the keeper of a secret . . . a fabulous exotic being in an English footballer’s disguise, composing verse in a tongue nobody understood about a remote country nobody knew. Small wonder I was not very popular with my team-mates.”
