Chelsea v Arsenal: a game featuring the three most expensive players in the Premier League. Few in the end would have come away dazzled by the three deep-lying midfield galacticos. Instead you were left wondering if there has ever been a worse time to be a goalkeeper.
The last couple of seasons have seen the biggest revolution in goalkeeping since the introduction of the back-pass rule more than 30 years ago. Progressive coaches have deconstructed and turned upside-down nearly every traditional “good habit” of goalkeeping. Keepers are being asked to play further and further from their goal, all the while engaging in risky short play with their team-mates which would have shocked and appalled goalkeepers of earlier eras. But the standards by which the keepers are judged and criticised have hardly changed at all.
It’s not as though people have ever been slow to blame goalkeepers. The truth is most ex-footballer pundits seem to hate them. Who can forget Roy Keane’s famous analysis of the Thierry Henry handball goal in Paris: “where’s my goalkeeper?” As Sunderland manager, unhappy with his keeper Craig Gordon’s form, Keane decided to demonstrate that shot-stopping wasn’t rocket science by pulling on gloves and saying he would pay £1,000 to any player who could score against him from outside the box. Keane won £100 from each of the eight players who tried and failed to score past him that day, but later reflected that his relationship with Gordon never really recovered.
Keane was one of the few pundits who gave his approval to Mikel Arteta’s suggestion earlier this season that he was going to rotate his goalkeepers – not because he sounded especially convinced by the idea, more because he seemed annoyed by the idea that goalkeepers should be a protected species who don’t have to face the same competition for places as everyone else.
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That, of course, was the position of his old team-mate Peter Schmeichel, and listening to Gary Neville’s reaction to the travails of the two goalkeepers at Stamford Bridge you wondered if maybe having worked with Schmeichel turned them against goalkeepers. If you played with Schmeichel for years, enduring the constant stream of abuse he would pour upon his team-mates, maybe you end up being both hostile to goalkeepers as a group, and contemptuous towards every individual goalkeeper who is not as good as Peter Schmeichel – ie nearly all of them.
Chelsea’s goal for 2-0 came when Mykhailo Mudryk sped down the left, glanced several times towards Nicolas Jackson in the centre, then, with the inside of his (weaker) left foot, hit a cross which improbably sailed over David Raya’s head and into the far top corner.
Mudryk told beINSports after the game that Chelsea’s goalkeeping coach, Toni Jimenez, had tipped him off about Raya’s habit of coming out past his near post in certain situations, and encouraged him to lift the ball over and beyond him. It sounded more like advice to hit his crosses deep rather than one weird trick to score from an impossible angle. Arteta was unimpressed when beIN relayed this information to him: “If it was on purpose...then credit to them,” he said, with obvious scepticism.
Mudryk has terrific speed and dribbling ability but hasn’t yet impressed with his laser precision – Mauricio Pochettino even boasted recently that he regularly trounces Mudryk at the crossbar challenge in training. He could try hitting that ball again 100 times and replicate the goal once; the goal was clearly a freak and not Raya’s fault. Not that this stopped Raya being accused by Neville of “flapping” and “becoming emotional”. Such talk does become a problem for Arteta, whose decision to drop Aaron Ramsdale for Raya has not yet been obviously vindicated.
Schmeichel, criticising Arteta’s “rotating goalkeepers” idea earlier this season, noted that “a goalkeeper’s position is very reactive. You cannot create anything on your own, you have to wait for things to happen.”
In fact goalkeeping is more proactive now than ever before. The problem is most of the time the keeper is being proactive too far back in the move for anyone to remember them when it’s time to distribute the credit.
Take Aston Villa’s third goal in their win against West Ham on Sunday. Ollie Watkins took the plaudits for his step-over and hammered finish into the near top corner. But the move started with Villa keeper Emiliano Martinez’s calm pass to Pau Torres. The fact that Watkins only has one defender to beat as he runs through from the halfway line is directly related to Martinez being prepared to accept the risk of delaying his pass at the back. That’s why West Ham had pushed forward in the hope that they could press him into a mistake. But Martinez has to accept that risk knowing that most people will not connect what he is doing to the chances that arise down the other end of the field a few seconds later.
People will only notice when things go wrong, as they nearly did for Raya when he passed the ball directly to Cole Palmer a couple of minutes after the 2-0 – luckily he managed to save at Palmer’s feet – and as they did for his counterpart Robert Sanchez in the 77th minute.
There was no apparent danger as Levi Colwill passed back to Sanchez, but then Declan Rice reacted faster than Conor Gallagher to Sanchez’s pass into midfield, and hit a beautiful swerving first-time shot into the far corner, with Sanchez stranded out of position. The shot was so good it might well have beaten the keeper even if he’d been standing in the middle of his goal, but this didn’t stop Sanchez’s pass being written up as the “howler” that cost Chelsea the win.
People should remember that Raya, Sanchez and nearly every other goalkeeper in the Premier League aren’t giving away goals by passing short to opponents in front of their own goal because they are insane, or because they want to be the star, or because they get a kick out of dicing with death. This type of mistake has become common because keepers are being told to play in a risky way by their managers. We can only hope that one day the judgment might catch up with the tactics.
