Keeping us on the edge of our seats
It’s an essential ingredient of any exciting match that at least one of the goalkeepers plays well. Partly it has to do with the aesthetics of a great save, which is something anyone who has ever played three-and-in can appreciate. From a spectator’s point of view, the most important thing about good goalkeepers is that they protect the value of goals, which is the key to football’s appeal as a spectator sport.
There’s nothing in sport like a goal. I watched the 100m final at the London Olympics from a front-row seat next to the finish line. I’ll never forget the long hush that erupted into a roar with the starter’s pistol, the huge sprinters pounding up the track, a sight that looked close-up more like a cavalry charge than something created by human athletes, the cheers from everyone around me as Usain Bolt powered through to win in an Olympic record, the stadium glittering with thousands of flashes as 80,000 people simultaneously tried to capture the moment.
The Olympic 100m final is the most-hyped showpiece in world sport; it happens only once every four years, and Bolt is the greatest sprinter we’ve ever seen. Everyone who was there knew that in sports spectator terms they had won the lottery. But heady as that atmosphere was, I’ve been at more football matches than I can remember where a goal has caused the crowd to go even more berserk.
Not that you would have suspected this if your exposure to football had been limited to Reading against Manchester United, a match in which goals came so cheaply that towards the end of the flurry the United’s scorers were barely celebrating.
This was what football might look like without goalkeepers. There had already been seven goals by the time either goalkeeper stopped a goalbound effort going into the net. By the end of the match, Adam Federici and Anders Lindegaard had made six saves between them and conceded seven.
Compare that to what happened in West Ham’s 3-1 defeat of Chelsea or Bayern Munich’s 1-1 draw with Borussia Dortmund. All four keepers involved produced brilliant saves at key moments, so that while Reading v United contained more goals in the first-half alone than the other two matches combined, it was far less gripping as a spectacle than either of them.
People who don’t get football think that it’s boring because it’s low-scoring and you can sometimes be unlucky enough to watch several matches in-a-row without seeing a goal. But entertainment in football is not really about goals. It’s about the build-up of tension and its release. The long periods of anxiety between goals are what makes those moments so precious.
Because they have no other function than to stand between the baying crowd and the release it’s looking for, goalkeepers often emerge as the key players in the drama. If you’ve got an inspired goalkeeper, a match with no goals can become an all-time classic, as Italy and Francesco Toldo proved when they beat Holland on penalties after drawing 0-0 in the semi-final of Euro 2000. When a goalkeeper plays well and eventually concedes, the joy of the goalscorer is magnified by the knowledge that it took something exceptional to beat the man between the posts.
At Upton Park on Saturday, Jussi Jaaskelainen did more than anyone to win the match for West Ham and let Sam Allardyce pogo up and down in celebration right under the nose of his enemy Rafael Benitez. Allardyce verbalised his delirious happiness in a post-match interview that turned into an extended metaphor about a giant cake, smothered in cherries, icing and lashings of cream. West Ham’s sponsors had named the striker Carlton Cole man-of-the-match. Hopefully Allardyce recognised that his goalkeeper was due the largest slice of the credit.
