Maybe this betrays my age, but whenever I think goalkeepers, I think Rene Higuita. The Colombian goalkeeper’s curly locks and prodigious moustache would have seen him pass off easily as a late 80s era Hollywood B-movie villain. Somewhat unfortunately then, he is best remembered for his suicidal forays outside his box, one of which ended in utter disaster courtesy a 40-something Cameroonian with fancy dance moves.
In the early 90s era of World Cups, Higuita’s audacity to bring the ball outside his own area was seen as, to put it mildly, frankly bonkers. Sedate English commentators could be seen raising their voices some fair decibels as the Colombian desperado slowly but steadily emerged from the safety of his own area, knocking the ball in front of him with his feet as if daring the opposition striker to engage him in some metaphorical Western movie sunset shootout.
Goalkeepers, went conventional wisdom, stayed put on their line, rarely venturing beyond the scuffed terrain of their six yard box. Moving into the 18 yard box was brave enough, going beyond was pure blasphemy. To put it simply then, Higuita, with his adventurous tendencies, shaggy hair, and scorpion kicks, was painted as the ultimate footballing radical.
It was a view I conformed to for the best part of a decade, but lately, I have begun to view the Colombian goalkeeper as a kind of revolutionary – a man who came so ahead of his time that the masses struggled to understand him. Because over the last half-decade, even as positions in football have grown and evolved, nothing really has changed as much as the role of the goalkeeper.
When you think great goalkeeper, you conjure up images of people like Gianluigi Buffon or Oliver Kahn or Peter Schmeichel. Or if you are older, you think Gordon Banks and Lev Yashin. There is a common thread that connects all these seemingly diverse characters. They are all great shot stoppers and they are all also great characters with just the right hint of crazy about them.
As Kahn once said: “How can you not be a little crazy if your day job consists of having footballs kicked at you at a ferocious pace?” But what really unites them is that none of these players are really footballers in the strictest sense of the word, ie these are guys who are good with their hands but not with their feet. Sounds strange in a game called football, no?
That was the thought that occurred to an assistant coach at Ajax during a card game with a local youth coach in 1990. Louis van Gaal was inspired by the Dutch 1974 goalkeeper Jan Jongbloed, who often exited his area to clear stray balls. But Van Gaal wanted to take it one step further. Teams, he felt, were playing football only with ten men when you had eleven on the pitch. The goalkeeper, he premised, was criminally underused as a footballer. The youth coach on the other side of the card game then recommended a candidate – a tall, willowy, calm footballer from a small fishing town. His name was Edwin van der Sar.
The future Manchester United goalkeeper would become the cornerstone of Van Gaal’s future Ajax side, which wowed Europe with their “circulation football,” the style which would a decade and some later define Barcelona. Van der Sar played like a sweeper hybrid, collecting balls from his center backs and playing passes with the nonchalance of a midfielder.
Like most good ideas, this too, took a while to catch on. Van der Sar fondly recalled how in Juventus he had once passed the ball to Paolo Montero who immediately cleared it into touched and screamed at him for playing such an “impossible” pass. The Italians, he learned, liked their keepers stylish and staying on the line.
But over the last five years, goalkeepers have evolved to become almost full scale outfield players. Post the Germany-Algeria game on Monday night, social media was awash with posts about Manuel Neuer’s apparent fearlessness in often coming out of the box. So amazed were people by Neuer’s outfield exploits that data site Squawka called his heatmap “the most talked about in history.” The world, it seemed, was finally waking up to what has always been Neuer’s major forte – the ability to play with his feet.
Neuer’s youth coach once said that “he could be an outfield player in the second division.” The goalkeeper once had three assists in a season for Schalke and in 2012 in a game against Bayer Leverkusen, dribbled past two opponents in front of the opposition box in a late search for a goal. But here is the clincher – in last season’s Champions League, Neuer’s average position as goalkeeper was outside his box. Yes, outside.
Neuer is the prototype of the modern sweeper-keeper hybrid. A player of this ilk has become even more necessary as teams try to play a higher and higher line to dominate their opposition or aim for quick transitions to catch opponents off guard. Consider his long punt that almost found Andre Schurrle running through on goal following an Algerian corner.
Neuer’s strategy is definitely higher-risk than that of goalkeepers in the past, which means that there is always the odd glaring error when some forward will dispossess him and score. But this just comes with the territory of playing this way, and ultimately the rewards that a goalkeeper of his skill can offer the team is manifold. It might be hard for traditionalists to appreciate, but the metrics used to evaluate goalkeepers have changed from shot stopping to passing. Reasonable too, when you realise that you probably make four to five times as many passes as you make saves.
What this means is that in modern football, how a goalkeeper does outside the area is more important than how he does inside. Somewhere out there, I imagine Higuita tipping a sunhat, sipping a drink, and cracking a smile.