Search: ' goalkeeping'
Stories
A life in the
football wilderness
by Justin Bryant
Bennion Kearny, £6.99
Reviewed by Ian Plenderleith
From WSC 320 October 2013
Unknown American goalkeeper Justin Bryant begins his memoir in the middle of a nature reserve watching alligators, describing the “sheer improbability [of] these Jurassic river dragons”. That’s the first thing that strikes you about Bryant – he doesn’t need a ghostwriter. And he’d be the first to admit that’s just as well, because his football career didn’t pay him enough to afford one.
There have been a good number of books by lower-level players in recent years describing the nitty-gritty of life at the game’s hard end, and long may struggling ex-pros continue to counter the egregious banality of the mailed-in Premier League star’s cynical book, hacked out in a few days for a six-figure advance. Small Time is an excellent prototype for any former player with a good story to tell. Bryant is honest, thoughtful, economic and introspective enough to realise his own shortcomings as a player and a person.
Growing up a fan of the Tampa Bay Rowdies in the North American Soccer League, and idolising goalkeeper Winston DuBose, Bryant becomes a decent high school goalkeeper and wins a scholarship to Radford University in Virginia. There his “sudden, terrible temper” during games wins him few friends and his scholarship is rescinded because of low grades. He returns to Florida, “a college flameout with no job”, and starts to play for the Orlando Lions, a team of college and ex-pro players that includes DuBose. From here on it’s a fragmented, frustrated career that takes him to various clubs including Brentford, Boreham Wood and Dunfermline Athletic, punctuated by spells back in Florida, all the time on low wages (if he gets paid at all), working supplementary menial jobs, and indulging in sporadic bouts of heavy drinking to drown his self-doubt.
While there are just enough glimpses of success and professional satisfaction to keep him motivated, Bryant’s career suffers because of his unwillingness to put in the extra training he knows is necessary to improve and impress, and because of his chronic pre-game nerves. His crippling fear of making an error and costing his team the game – a full-time burden that only a goalkeeper has to bear – leads to a debilitating, and undiagnosed, stomach condition that he carries with him for years and which only subsides when he steps back from football. Making a comeback for the Lions in his 30s after being lured by the prospect of $50 a game just for sitting on the bench, Bryant suddenly finds he is the first-choice keeper and writes: “My gut rippled with excitement and dread, a feeling I hadn’t had in years. Nothing about it was pleasant.” When he plays well, he’s above all else “relieved that I hadn’t made an idiot of myself”.
However, there’s far more to this book than the author’s insecurities. This is a finely written chronicle of butt-end semi-pro football, its moronic dressing-room culture, the tedium of travel, the philosophy of goalkeeping, the political perils of ever-changing coaches and team-mates and the constant, pressing need to prove yourself, game after game, only to realise after several years that “being part of a team… apparently didn’t suit my personality”. Being a writer, though, clearly does.
A History of the Goalkeeper
by Jonathan Wilson
Orion Books, £20
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien
From WSC 314 April 2013
Of all the “name” football writers on the merry-go-round today, Jonathan Wilson is arguably the best value, even if a few of his many theories and pet obsessions tend towards the overly self-indulgent. He’s a busy man, too – running the quarterly Blizzard while producing columns for the Guardian and Sports Illustrated and roughly one book per year. The Outsider is his sixth tome since 2006, the kind of workrate that sees a lot of writers spread themselves too thinly. But Wilson’s prodigious energy doesn’t seem to dilute the quality of what he comes up with and this meticulous study of the goalkeeping art is characterised by the attention to detail that he brings to everything he writes.
Starting with a study of football in the 1800s, he demonstrates how the mere fact of being a goalkeeper has always carried with it the smell of the scapegoat. In Victorian times the position was occupied by small boys, “duffers” and “funk-sticks” (milksops who had failed to perform elsewhere on the pitch). As the years went on and the sport evolved at snail’s pace, deaths were commonplace for keepers – Celtic’s John Thomson, accidentally kicked in the head during a match in 1931, being an infamous example.
Wilson has put in plenty of air miles, heading for locales as far-flung as Brazil and Russia. The latter country, which once produced great keepers by the lorryload, has nursed a special obsession with the position since before the 1917 revolution (an assertion backed up with quotes from none other than novelist Vladimir Nabokov). Brazil, contrariwise, has had mostly white keepers due to some strange socio-racial issues – the odd exception such as Dida not withstanding. Although, as Wilson shows, English football has nurtured a similar instinctive distrust of black keepers.
African keepers, specifically, sit even lower down the food chain of perception. Two of the best, Cameroon’s Thomas N’Kono and Joseph-Antoine Bell, enjoyed a (mostly) friendly 20-year rivalry after learning from Yugoslavian legend Vladimir Beara. N’Kono was the natural, Bell the hard worker. N’Kono shone at the 1982 World Cup, got a move to Spain out of it and became an Espanyol hero. Bell had to wait until the disastrous USA 94 campaign to play in the finals, by which time he was 39 and too far over the hill to do himself justice.
Wilson’s fondness for idiosyncratic structuring sometimes weakens the book’s sense of direction. The Brazilian chapter abruptly veers into Scotland for several pages, then heads back to Brazil. Not that the material therein isn’t interesting or informative – the passages concerning the appalling bad luck that plagued Jim Leighton’s long career are particularly vivid – but layering the material in such an odd way seems unnecessarily perverse.
In the main The Outsider is a terrific history of its subject. It wears its knowledgeable perspective lightly and deftly works its vast research into the text without battering you over the head with it. Wilson can always be relied upon to come up with something a little bit different and a little bit special, and this has plenty of both.
Adam Bate considers why so few former goalkeepers have been managers in the Premier League
Joey Barton may have felt he was insulting Neil Warnock by likening him to the eponymous film hero Mike Bassett, but there is no identikit for the football manager. All sorts of folk have trodden the touchline in England, but only two goalkeepers have ever managed in the Premier League. Nearly two decades on from Mike Walker’s sacking at Everton, it is surely high time we asked the question: where are all the goalkeeper managers?
With Sky now filming matches with up to 24 cameras it seems unthinkable that audiences could miss top-flight football, but games went unrecorded as recently as 1990. Mike Whalley explains
If anyone ever produces a DVD tribute to former Sheffield Wednesday striker David Hirst, it ought to include clips of his efforts as an emergency goalkeeper against Manchester City on New Year’s Day, 1990. It won’t, though, because no footage exists. Having scored Wednesday’s first in a 2-0 win, Hirst went in goal to replace the injured Kevin Pressman and made impressive saves from Steve Redmond and Colin Hendry.