Some people say England lose in big football tournaments, because they can't take penalties, I say it's because England goalkeepers are just not crazy enough..
It can't be any coincidence that the only big game that has ever ended satisfactorily for us on the world stage was at the end of the Second World War in Escape to Victory when someone snapped Kevin O'Callaghan's arm in half so they could send on a big dumb American to play in goals. He didn't even know how to play football but he still managed to save the last minute penalty. The German penalty taker didn't miss it because Sylvester Stallone was any good between the posts. It's just that he was larger than life and he had a right gob on him. And he jumped around a lot in slow motion.
I occasionally used to play in goals when I was a kid. Mostly when none of the first five choices of goalkeeper were available. I once played in goal in a pre-season friendly against the age group above us that we lost 13-2. I was about 12 at the time. The only save I made in the whole game got knocked in on the rebound. And do you know what the manager said to me afterwards?
He said: “To be fair, although basically your all round game was shit, your main problem was that you were nowhere near angry or dangerous enough. None of the attackers at any point were afraid for their lives, none of them expected to lose a limb when they got near the penalty box.”
I'm 46 now and I've got arthritis and if I drop a tea towel on the floor it can take 15 or so minutes for me to bend down and pick it up, but I think if you stuck me between some goalposts doing my tea towel thing in slow motion I could probably still save one penalty in 10. Most of them just go down the middle anyway. And if you were to wonder where you'd seen that old tea towel recovery manoeuvre before, that's right you've guessed it, it was Peter Shilton in Italia '90.
I don't blame Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle for 1990. It was Shilton. He was 40 at the time, and he wasn't so much going down in instalments, he was going down in those weekly instalments that you get from the newsagents that you used to spend your pocket money on. You know, the ones that were cheap for the first two weeks, and then they cost a fortune every week after that for an unending load of old crap. He seemed to spend the entire shootout waiting for Issue Z.
Now, admittedly Shilton is the most capped England player of all time, and I've won, well no caps for England, but let me advance a theory...
England don't get knocked out because they lose on penalties. They get knocked out because their goalies just aren't hard enough. England goalkeepers are neither the right sort of crazy nor the wrong sort of dangerous to make truly world class stoppers.
And Robert Green throwing the ball into his own net wasn't even the start of it...Oh no...
Maradona in '86, for example. All that controversy about the handball should have been academic. Maradona shouldn't have got anywhere near that ball. The much taller Shilton, who was actually allowed to use his hands, should have cleaned him out well before he got even close. I'm not sticking up for Schumacher and his atrocity against Battiston in the 1982 World Cup semi-final when he nearly killed him, but at least in that incident, and despite the clumsiness and recklessness of his actions, Schumacher was at least alive to the danger. The ball hadn't even got into the penalty area.
And Maradona's second goal in '86, you know the greatest goal of all time and all that. If it'd been Ramon Quiroga of Peru circa 1978 he wouldn't only have stopped the first Maradona goal, he's have stopped the second one too, by strangling him on the halfway line.
Going back to Shilton, it should never even have got to penalties in 1990 against Germany. If Shilton hadn't fallen over into the net after Paul Parker's deflection, it would have been 1-0. If Peter Schmeichel had been in goal he wouldn't have even needed to jump for it, he would have scared the ball away just by screaming at his defenders. And in the penalties themselves Shilton was like a statue. The German lad was half his age. Why didn't he retire in about '87? He didn't even think to try and put the Germans off by doing a jelly legs Bruce Grobbelaar impersonation.
Then there was Seaman in 2002. Falling into the net and crying into his ponytail, because he got chipped from the halfway line by Ronaldinho. If he'd been a nutjob like Higuita from Colombia he wouldn't have only stayed on his line, he'd have cleared it with a Scorpion kick. Or if he'd been more like Chilavert from Paraguay he'd have gone up the other end and smashed in a free kick of his own to equalise, then if they'd still got knocked out by the world's first ever Golden Goal from Laurent Blanc he wouldn't have sat around crying in the goal and feeling sorry for himself, he'd have gone round and commiserated with all his team-mates
And I wasn't old enough to watch Bonetti in 1970 but I do know his challenge on Gerd Muller for the winner was non-existent, I've seen the replays...
It's not as if the English haven't had any role models to follow. If only we'd paid attention. When Bert Trautmann was running around with a broken neck snapping the legs of anyone who dared come near him in the 1956 FA Cup Final, why wasn't this being put into an FA coaching newsreel to be shown to our up and coming goalkeepers. I could have done with a dose of that myself. I might have only lost 12-2 then.
Some people have said that I can be a bit harsh on Shilton, and admittedly I'm no football expert. So here are some words from Brian Clough, someone who managed him for a number of years at Forest, from around 1989. (I met him once at a book signing, but every bloody local journalist in the greater Teesside area was trying to get 5 minutes with him, so I never got the chance to ask him about the 1990 penalty shoot-out)
"Shilton has shot his bolt," insisted Clough, after the veteran keeper gained his 102nd cap against Sweden.
"The World Cup finals are 18 months away, but 18 months is a long time for a goalkeeper who is already 39 years old".
If he'd retired sooner, instead of going on to amass a record 125 caps, he could have avoided the spectacle that was his final game, the third place play-off against Italy at Italia 90 when he ended up wandering around his penalty box for about half an hour, like a man who'd forgotten where he'd parked his car. Of at least if he'd chopped Baggio or Schillaci down, like Trautmann would have done, he could have gone out in a blaze of glory.
I suppose in retrospect he was still a better goalkeeper than I was. I never got another game in goals after that 13-2 defeat. Although I did go on to become quite an aggressive outfield player, who at one point circa 1982 did my very own Ramon Quiroga impersonation, by rugby tackling a big fat kid with tree trunk legs who I otherwise just kept bouncing off. I didn't even get booked. Everyone just laughed, including the referee. It was in the days of Schumacher when football was more like cage fighting, and you had to more or less kill someone to even get a yellow....But that's another story....
I occasionally used to play in goals when I was a kid. Mostly when none of the first five choices of goalkeeper were available. I once played in goal in a pre-season friendly against the age group above us that we lost 13-2. I was about 12 at the time. The only save I made in the whole game got knocked in on the rebound. And do you know what the manager said to me afterwards?
He said: “To be fair, although basically your all round game was shit, your main problem was that you were nowhere near angry or dangerous enough. None of the attackers at any point were afraid for their lives, none of them expected to lose a limb when they got near the penalty box.”
I'm 46 now and I've got arthritis and if I drop a tea towel on the floor it can take 15 or so minutes for me to bend down and pick it up, but I think if you stuck me between some goalposts doing my tea towel thing in slow motion I could probably still save one penalty in 10. Most of them just go down the middle anyway. And if you were to wonder where you'd seen that old tea towel recovery manoeuvre before, that's right you've guessed it, it was Peter Shilton in Italia '90.
I don't blame Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle for 1990. It was Shilton. He was 40 at the time, and he wasn't so much going down in instalments, he was going down in those weekly instalments that you get from the newsagents that you used to spend your pocket money on. You know, the ones that were cheap for the first two weeks, and then they cost a fortune every week after that for an unending load of old crap. He seemed to spend the entire shootout waiting for Issue Z.
Now, admittedly Shilton is the most capped England player of all time, and I've won, well no caps for England, but let me advance a theory...
England don't get knocked out because they lose on penalties. They get knocked out because their goalies just aren't hard enough. England goalkeepers are neither the right sort of crazy nor the wrong sort of dangerous to make truly world class stoppers.
And Robert Green throwing the ball into his own net wasn't even the start of it...Oh no...
Maradona in '86, for example. All that controversy about the handball should have been academic. Maradona shouldn't have got anywhere near that ball. The much taller Shilton, who was actually allowed to use his hands, should have cleaned him out well before he got even close. I'm not sticking up for Schumacher and his atrocity against Battiston in the 1982 World Cup semi-final when he nearly killed him, but at least in that incident, and despite the clumsiness and recklessness of his actions, Schumacher was at least alive to the danger. The ball hadn't even got into the penalty area.
And Maradona's second goal in '86, you know the greatest goal of all time and all that. If it'd been Ramon Quiroga of Peru circa 1978 he wouldn't only have stopped the first Maradona goal, he's have stopped the second one too, by strangling him on the halfway line.
Going back to Shilton, it should never even have got to penalties in 1990 against Germany. If Shilton hadn't fallen over into the net after Paul Parker's deflection, it would have been 1-0. If Peter Schmeichel had been in goal he wouldn't have even needed to jump for it, he would have scared the ball away just by screaming at his defenders. And in the penalties themselves Shilton was like a statue. The German lad was half his age. Why didn't he retire in about '87? He didn't even think to try and put the Germans off by doing a jelly legs Bruce Grobbelaar impersonation.
Then there was Seaman in 2002. Falling into the net and crying into his ponytail, because he got chipped from the halfway line by Ronaldinho. If he'd been a nutjob like Higuita from Colombia he wouldn't have only stayed on his line, he'd have cleared it with a Scorpion kick. Or if he'd been more like Chilavert from Paraguay he'd have gone up the other end and smashed in a free kick of his own to equalise, then if they'd still got knocked out by the world's first ever Golden Goal from Laurent Blanc he wouldn't have sat around crying in the goal and feeling sorry for himself, he'd have gone round and commiserated with all his team-mates
And I wasn't old enough to watch Bonetti in 1970 but I do know his challenge on Gerd Muller for the winner was non-existent, I've seen the replays...
It's not as if the English haven't had any role models to follow. If only we'd paid attention. When Bert Trautmann was running around with a broken neck snapping the legs of anyone who dared come near him in the 1956 FA Cup Final, why wasn't this being put into an FA coaching newsreel to be shown to our up and coming goalkeepers. I could have done with a dose of that myself. I might have only lost 12-2 then.
Some people have said that I can be a bit harsh on Shilton, and admittedly I'm no football expert. So here are some words from Brian Clough, someone who managed him for a number of years at Forest, from around 1989. (I met him once at a book signing, but every bloody local journalist in the greater Teesside area was trying to get 5 minutes with him, so I never got the chance to ask him about the 1990 penalty shoot-out)
"Shilton has shot his bolt," insisted Clough, after the veteran keeper gained his 102nd cap against Sweden.
"The World Cup finals are 18 months away, but 18 months is a long time for a goalkeeper who is already 39 years old".
If he'd retired sooner, instead of going on to amass a record 125 caps, he could have avoided the spectacle that was his final game, the third place play-off against Italy at Italia 90 when he ended up wandering around his penalty box for about half an hour, like a man who'd forgotten where he'd parked his car. Of at least if he'd chopped Baggio or Schillaci down, like Trautmann would have done, he could have gone out in a blaze of glory.
I suppose in retrospect he was still a better goalkeeper than I was. I never got another game in goals after that 13-2 defeat. Although I did go on to become quite an aggressive outfield player, who at one point circa 1982 did my very own Ramon Quiroga impersonation, by rugby tackling a big fat kid with tree trunk legs who I otherwise just kept bouncing off. I didn't even get booked. Everyone just laughed, including the referee. It was in the days of Schumacher when football was more like cage fighting, and you had to more or less kill someone to even get a yellow....But that's another story....
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