There’s no escape for goalkeepers

There are a couple of things more certain than death and taxes, writes Donal Óg Cusack .

If you are wandering through Lisbon, daydreaming as you soak in the atmosphere being generated by the whole population of Madrid which has been shipped in for the Champions League final, the one person who will recognise you will be a Kilkenny fella. They have spies everywhere.

The other certainty is that goalkeeping, like death and taxes, and Kilkenny men will always track you down and try to finish you off. I’ve watched Iker Casillas for a long time. Fourteen years ago, a few days after he turned 19, I watched him play in his first Champions League final. Cocky as a Corkman. He breezed it. Two years later he came on against Bayer Leverkusen in the 2002 final and made some incredible saves. That summer in South Korea he made an amazing save against Robbie Keane when we played them in the World Cup. He had that power. He could win games on his own.

Ken Dryden, the hockey goalkeeper whose book The Game is one of the great accounts of what it’s like inside the dressing-room of an elite team, said “a goalie’s job is to stop pucks… well yeah that’s part of it. But you know what else it is? You’re trying to deliver a message to your team that things are ok back here. This end of the ice is pretty well cared for. You take it now and go. Go! Feel the freedom you need in order to be that dynamic, creative, offensive player and go out and score. That was my job. And it was to try to deliver a feeling”.

The goalie delivers the feeling and he manages the game. Casillas was great to watch because of the way he could invent techniques to stop shots. He used his feet a lot. He was like lightning across the goal line. He never thought twice. It was always right. Last Saturday night I couldn’t take my eyes off him when he was warming up. He’s 34 now and I could see goalkeeping had its hand on his windpipe. He had what looked like a goalkeeping coach delivering shots to him and if you know goalkeeping you could see that there was something wrong. Every shot was soft. Handy height.

He was being nursed into the game. Real Madrid were being careful not to upset the confidence of the greatest modern keeper. At one point another one of the staff lashed a ball hard and into the net whistling past Casillas. The goalkeeping coach turned and snapped at him straight away. If all was right with Casillas he would have been challenging the player to try that again. Maybe that bit of doubt was what Mourinho saw when he dropped Casillas when he was at Real. Mourinho isn’t a fool. Did he believe Casillas could deliver that sense of vulnerability to the team?

When the game started in Lisbon I kept watching Casillas. If you understand the position you understand that shot stopping is just the basic grammar of goalkeeping. Some keepers have great grammar. Others get by. But you can be eloquent without great grammar and you can be a goalie without being a great stopper. What makes a brilliant goalie is to have the shot stopping and all the other stuff. The goalie can’t fear failure or getting hurt. He needs to be in control and game management skills are one of the most important he can have.

He can’t get under the skin of a game and beat with it’s pulse like an outfield player. He just has to get into the zone that allows him to operate without hesitation. See. Decide. Act.

When you have to start thinking too much, when you can’t find that zone, when there is a disconnect between the see and act, the position you thought you mastered finally masters you. Any fear causes hesitance. In my GK notes I always carried a simple equation. Fear = Hesitation, Hesitation = Mistakes. Your whole career is a struggle against that day you have to think too much.

On Saturday Casillas was losing that struggle. The goal he handed to Atletico was just the biggest symptom of what was wrong with him. Most of what he did was weighted down by doubt. The timing was gone. When that happens it’s like the old song. Send in the clowns.

I wanted Atletico to win but I didn’t want Real Madrid to lose and for that loss to go into Casillas’s account. He has been too great to deserve that. When his team got the equaliser which brought them into extra time Casillas’s face had the joy of a fella who had been spared the hangman. I know though that when it was all over and the relief had eased off and the pulse had slowed down the night will haunt him. How will he ever get back the feeling he had when he was 19 and bulletproof? My father’s friend Dinny often said to me the happiest he ever saw me in life was when I was between the sticks. He was right. When you have the power in you there is nothing like it. For goalies it doesn’t end the way it does for outfield players. The legs don’t go. Either the position kills you or somebody who doesn’t really know goalkeeping comes in and shoots you before you can go of your own accord.

When it’s over your body and your brain misses the feeling so bad that it is a craving. On Sunday I shared a desk with Brendan Cummins on The Sunday Game. It was good to see him and as two inter-county men put out to pasture we compared notes. I’ll be between the sticks for Cloyne this Sunday. Brendan surprised me by saying that he was playing outfield these days. He’d never stand in goal again. I asked him why and his answer made perfect sense. When he is in goal he knows the position hasn’t taken him down yet. He knows he still has the grammar and all the other stuff, he can convey freedom to the rest of the team, he can manage the game. The backs know his confidence and respond to his calls. Thirty or more times in a game he stands with the ball in his hand, nobody allowed to challenge him and he can control the tempo and the mood with his experience. And not doing that to the highest level hurts too much. So he doesn’t do it at all.

It’s not a judgement on anybody who does it after you walk away. It’s just the knowledge you could still do it yourself. You wanted an extension of the lease on that spot between the sticks until the position reached out and strangled you. Watching Casillas I envied him and felt sorry for him. As he waved to the crowd at full time I felt a lump in my throat. Every goalie feels something for a brother in trouble. Especially a warrior like Casillas. But if it finishes for the great man soon it will be a natural end. He won’t drop down the grades desperately looking for a way to get back the old confidence. He’ll know that he had goalkeeping by the throat for a long time and in that time he did it better than anybody. If it beats him so be it. He walks away fulfilled. That’s what sport is about.

I remember in the great days I’d do yoga on the morning of big matches. For the body and the brain. I’d stretch and all that but I’d strike warrior poses in a room with a yoga instructor for company and I’d accept my vulnerabilities. I’d take them in and make them part of me. I’d get ready for the waves of mad noise in Semple or the Park or Croker and get my mind to a place where I could be one with that atmosphere.

It sounds mad. You understand or you don’t. Often in the mornings in the shower I’d commentate to myself describing good saves or puck outs. Just getting my mind right. The positivity was like a vitamin protecting me from the day when the position or somebody would try and bring me down.

The lights went up in the studio last Sunday and Brendan and myself talked the talk. It was grand and we do our best but we’d rather have been looking at each other across the length of a pitch as we so often did with every class of war and madness going on between us and around us. Both of us trying to be the general for our army.

We’re mad. We miss it. The end wasn’t natural. Iker Casillas is struggling but in a studio all dickied up in our suits we envied him the struggle. He’s still fighting for a dream. We’re just two fellas on the TV…