Devil’s in the details for goalkeeping’s fantastic four
The intellectuals of football: always thoughtful, sometimes eccentric, occasionally mad.
They have the longest careers in game, but also the more perilous. One howler and there’s no going back.
Managers are fond of saying that at this stage of the Champions League the difference between success and failure comes down to details.
So do many of life’s challenges of course, such as making an omelette or lighting a fire in the rain.
Usually European semi-finals are less predictable, however, and very often those decisive details depend on the performance of the characters between the posts. There is a nice symmetry about the four in the firing line this week: the two Spanish rivals in one semi-final, the oldest and the youngest in the other. All four are probably in the world’s top 10 at present, especially as two of the main contenders, Gigi Buffon and Julio Cesar, have been injured and below par.
Tomorrow night’s show — El Clasico III — could well be decided by Victor Valdes and Iker Casillas.
Valdes has sometimes been a weak link for Barcelona but although he is only third-choice for Spain he has conceded just 15 league goals this season in 29 matches. When your team has 75% of the possession of course it’s easier to keep clean sheets.
The stats show Valdes has had to make just 112 saves in those games. Iker Casillas has conceded 12 more than Valdes but has also had to make 42 more saves.
Casillas is the sounder of the two, no doubt about that; 119 caps is an amazing total at the age of 29 (Valdés, who is the same age, has just three). That’s ahead of any top international goalkeeper in world — Buffon has 104, and he’s four years older.
Casillas is also one of the shortest around at just under 6ft — a throwback to the old days before keepers turned into basketball players.
In the league match 10 days ago Casillas produced several incredible stops — one, unsighted, from Lionel Messi sticks in the mind. Real are on a roll, but his reactions are surely going to be tested to the full tomorrow, especially in the absence of the suspended Ricardo Carvalho.
For me, tonight’s head-to-head between Edwin Van der Sar and Manuel Neuer is more intriguing, not least because both of them may be on their way before long: Neuer to Bayern Munich, Van der Sar to a well-deserved rest.
Van der Sar won even more caps in his career than Casillas currently has and he was being virtually written off a decade ago, when he was replaced by Buffon at Juventus. For some reason he went through a bad couple of seasons then and was prone to pushing long shots out into the path of oncoming strikers.
Ten years and 10 trophies later he is still a top keeper, but age is starting to show. Reactions have slowed and sometimes he seems troubled by shots low down to his left, which might be fatal against a striker with Raul’s experience and precision.
Neuer is probably the best of the new generation of European goalkeepers: big, strong, brave, commanding — a bit like Peter Schmeichel.
Schalke wouldn’t be in the semi-final without him, in fact they might well have been relegated so bad has their league form been.
But Neuer has had a difficult few days since he announced he was going to leave, rather oddly choosing to do it on his Facebook page, which was then swamped by thousands of protests from the fans.
He’s a local boy, he’s been at the club since the age of four, and the reaction to his rumoured move to Bayern Munich is a bit like when Steven Gerrard was about to leave Liverpool for Chelsea. One of their favourite stadium songs at Schalke is a punk rock anthem entitled “Ich würde nie zum FC Bayern München gehen” (I would never go to Bayern Munich).
Out of consideration for Neuer they won’t be playing that one tonight. But there is definitely a bit of tension in the air.
