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Hey, I'm Jada Boomerad. I'm Robert Brody. This is Radio Lab, the podcast. So today we're going to do something a little different on the podcast.
We're going to present a story that you and I ran into in Chicago. In Chicago, it won an award this story and it's just quite wonderful. This is about soccer. And it happened to remind us about a show that we're putting together for the spring on the topic of symmetry.
Chemistry, symmetry, hair, parting, symmetry. All different kinds. By the way. But that's later.
Oh, I'm sorry, you're about to say the goobart. It turns out that we get to do the show not only on the radio, but in three fabulous cities in the United States. Live. We have shows in New York, unfortunately that one's sold out, but we'll be in LA, March 23rd in Seattle, March 30th.
And it's going to be really fun and it'll be about symmetry. Yeah, so which takes us back to our subject? Soccer, which at least appears quite symmetrical. Yeah, you got two teams.
Eleven people on each side. That's right. Two coaches, two sets of fans. However, there are two people on that field.
One of the players in the world is a professor on the other side who are living in a very different psychological universe from the rest of the athletes. And that's the subject. The loneliness of the goalkeeper. And the reporter is Hardee Sing Coley, who is, well, friendly, was in his earlier life a goalkeeper himself.
He's a book author and regular presenter on the BBC and he's talking to a guy named Bob Wilson, who's goalkeeper for a very famous British soccer team. That's right. In the 1677, that's the golden age. And the piece begins with the following question.
But what is it about goalkeepers? Are they a breed apart? They're the only individual in what is a team game. In other words, the other ten guys can make numerous mistakes in a game.
Even the star striker, he can miss five, six, eight chances in a game and score a winning goal in the 89th minute of a match. And he goes home the hero. And the reverse situation that is the goalkeeper, this lonely individual, the only one who's allowed to use his hands with the purpose of negating the game, with the whole purpose of a game of football, is to score goals. And the one villain in the piece is the bloke between the sticks, the goalie.
And all the other ten guys around you understand that as well. They do think you're crazy. You're putting yourself in this position where for 89 minutes you do the reverse, you play brilliantly. And in the 90th minute you make a positional error or the ball moves, swerves and dips, and it looks as if it's your fault.
I've got this image of goalkeepers, mostly because I was that goalkeeper, that leapt for that high ball only to see the ball go into the back of the net. And that moment, can you explain to me that moment, Bob, when the rest of the team are walking back to the halfway line as you're picking the ball up out of the net? You're alone. I mean, I can give you a very, very good example of playing in an FA Cup final.
And five days earlier we've gone to White Heart Lane and we've become champions of England. And so we've got an opportunity to become on the second club that's centre to win the double. So we go, we're playing the ball. Everything to play for in the 1971 Cup final.
And I've had the best season I've ever had in my career. And there's suddenly Steve Highway cuts in from the left wing. I've probably got it wrong by a yard and a half. Highway on the edge of the box of John Chiffelibou, perhaps?
And it's there! He strikes the goal and it flew in the back of the net. One nil down, the doubles out the window, and Bob Wilson is suddenly the guy who is likely to cost Arsenal the double. Steve Highway, next hit, one nil.
And as I spun round on my pants on the floor, Frank McClintock, our captain put his hands on his hips and actually moused, you stupid. You stupid. You stupid. Charlie George.
It didn't cost us. Charlie George won as the double. I finished up being Arsenal's player of the year in the double season. Fantastic.
But to my dying day, when people meet me, they say, well, what did you do with Steve Highway then? It's always comes up, not the million good saves I've ever made. It's always about, oh, you got your near post wrong, didn't you? Now here's a challenge that I've never understood.
If you're a goalkeeper in a team that isn't very good, you're constantly vigilant. The ball's always coming at you. If however, you're Bob Wilson, playing behind ten of the best players in the world at that time. For 89 minutes of a 90 minute game, you don't have a great deal to do.
How do you stay focused? Do you remember the bionic man? When the ball was at the other end of the field, I imagined that the guy on the ball, the opponent, was Steve Austin. So he could turn around at any part of the pitch, 60 yards away, 70 yards away, 110 yards away, and strike the ball towards my goal.
Happy to be able to stay on the attack. There's a cross in! Thank you to the header! Fantastic save by Schreichl!
That's a win for the final. Left with a cross in the chance. All must score in three and save by Basso. Tits in the left with a criminal.
Schreichl! Great save. What a crucial money is. A cross in the corner of the ball.
And it's more! Not bad! Swapper back, middle and save by Gordon Betts. A two-per-piece of running by Gondino.
Went down the right. Top of the ball. And now with Coneg, Coneg, in the back. That's it.
That's it. Challenge. Go, Head. I'll take off you, go.
Go on. Here we go. Sunday mid-morning. South coast of England.
Brighton. And in the background you can hear. Some under-sixteenths. Twenty-two of them.
Chasing a ball around a pitch. Well, actually, technically speaking, it's 20 of them. The goalkeeper's either side on their own with no one to talk to. The game to watch.
The backs of their colleagues in the face of their opposition. Almost poetic. It's me getting carried away once I'm on more cross the road. I'm hearing a man called Gem Wall who is an actor.
That was a good retackle there. Sorry. Slightly bought off by a great wee tackle. Now Gem is acting in a Peter Flannery play called The Boys Own Story, which is all about a goalkeeper.
Gem Wall. Yeah. Oh, all right. So we just kicked off then.
We just kicked off, but we're about ten minutes in and the press and panvers are a go down. I'm afraid. Was that a go-keeping error? It was not a go-keeping error.
It was union. Even if I'd gone through his hands, I wouldn't have said it to keep us. It was a very good long-range, long-range shot and a very good midfield pass. No, I don't mean to be cruel, right?
But see that goalkeeper there? Is that our keeper or their keeper? That's our keeper. Our keeper's the quality-looking keeper with the yellow top in our gloves.
See their keeper? That's exactly what I look like when I was a boy. I don't mean to be cruel. How would you describe him?
Slightly Lardy. Slightly Lardy. I don't play in gold, but I coach the goalkeeper down here. I'd say, when I was a kid, the idea of going and going, just battle me.
Why would you want to go and go? I've never known, I've always been fascinated by the kids who want to go and go. But later on in my life when I became an actor, I ended up doing a play about a goalkeeper. I got to meet goalkeepers.
I did two days training down here with Brighton and Hov Albion. No, no, no. Is that a gold? Sorry, that's too naughty on the team.
Look at the keeper. He's looking skyward. He won't pick the ball. He won't pick the ball.
He's gone actually through the net. That should be clear. The cross you never have come in. The goalkeeper got the win for that.
I think goalkeepers got a rough deal. When we were doing the play, it was a very simple set. It was simply goal post, didn't it? It was a full size and set in the penalty area of John McKenna, the greatest goalkeeper, never to play for England.
He's asking for the ball, talking as goalkeepers are supposed to do to keep themselves mentally alert. The thing is he never gets the ball. They hate him. The team hate him and they will never pass through him.
Good tackle, Dave. Come on, Dave. If you need me. All right, don't know.
I'll play Dave. See what I mean. They'd rather do without me. On the last line of defence, when I'm called into the game, it means they failed.
They don't like that. Yeah, lads. Of course they're glad to have me here just in case. Glad it's me throwing myself about.
Glad it's my head that goes in when the boots are flying. But they do without me if they could. Wouldn't you? The object of their game is to score goals.
The object of mine is to stop them. I'm here to spoil their game. I can't win a game. I can only lose it.
So how can I be one of them? Not that I want to be one of them. When to them. I'm just a necessary evil.
Go on, kid. Have a shot. No, no, no, don't tackle it. I could have saved that.
I'd forward Greg. Saved them all. Tipped it up in the air. But not enough to put it over the bar.
He came down behind him. He went by so he was charged by a center forward. Loughtau's into the net ball as well. He was a young goalkeeper.
I played for St. John's primary school in Sevennose. Poet and keeper, Murray Lachlan Young. Keeper in the loosest sense of the word.
We played a local big team. It's on Manchester United of the area which was Amherst school. And I think they beat a 17-0. The scoring of which goal broke the young.
Murray Lachlan Young. I think it was probably about five or six-0 when I realized that there was probably only about ten minutes of the game gone. The team had gone from being encouraging to looking the other way. How long did it take you before you went back and goal?
I think about 32 years. It may just be a coincidence that you are a poet and a writer and a performer. Do you think there is a commonality in that experience of the creative? For maybe for people who think they are a bit special.
Perhaps it seems to be the ideal place because as a striker you may always be part of another striker. But it is only one goalkeeper. He gets to wear a different strip than the rest of the team and has his own universe to operate in. That's four-nose.
We're going to have a slight last time. We have better taken apart here. I wonder how much of his confidence has gone there. I bet I'm lucky.
Can I take that? Kariger, has to pull... I was to the mistake! Kariger headed the pole back to the pole in Sculpeaver.
He just didn't pick it up. Extraordinary! I think how I used to feel when I let a goal in. Ridiculous.
That feeling of letting everybody down. Oh I say, that type is letting go right through his body and into the back of the net. That isn't a pull in Sculpeaver. I used to go home after a match of city and literally shed tears over a goal I'd let him.
Blaming myself for the one that beat us. I'd go over and over and over in my head. Why didn't I go for the cross? Why didn't I see him coming in on the back stick?
Where was my cover? Where was my cover? Was the full back sitting at home crying his eyes out? Poor old Paul Robinson, the England goalkeeper, was undone.
When a back pass came towards him, he aimed a kick at it, missed, the ball went into the goal. It wasn't his fault, the ball bobbled it. It was a goal, it was a look to come and look like Robinson's fault, he knows it wasn't and yet it still destroyed him. Chief Sports writer of the Times, Simon Barnes, another writer, another man who spends his time alone hoping to make a mark on the world and yes, another former goalkeeper.
I think I'm developing a theory here and Simon's got a role call of loners and Mavericks to support it. Yes, the Renaissance goalkeepers, it's a finalist and it begins with Alber Camus, author of The Outsider, all goalkeepers by definition, et onge, but Camus famously said that all that I know most surely about morality and the obligations of man I know from sport. Others include Huoyo Iglesias, Che Guevara, was a goalkeeper out of necessity because he loved football but he had asthma so he couldn't cut it as an outfielder. The late Pope for John Paul II was also a goalkeeper and Vladimir Nabokov, who liked to be seen as sublimally different from the crowd and this was what Vladimir Nabokov, a goalkeeper and occasional novelist, wrote about the higher of his two arts.
As with folded arms I lent against the left goalposts, I enjoyed the luxury of closing my eyes and thus I would listen to my heart knocking and feel the blind drizzle on my face and here in the distance the broken sounds of the game and think of myself as of a fabulous exotic being in an English footballers' disguise, composing my verse in a tongue nobody understood about a remote country nobody knew. I wonder I was not very popular with my teammates. I think that's a beautiful moment of serenity that only a goalkeeper can know in the middle of a game of football that in the bustle of it all you have time to yourself, time to reflect, time to many goalkeepers eventually used to destroy themselves, essentially destroy their sporting nerve. Now that comment by Simon, Che Guevara played in gold because of severe childhood asthma.
I've done a bit of research on that list of Renaissance goalies and you know Albre Camus developed TB as a youngster. Vladimir Nabokov nearly died of pneumonia as a child and then was traumatized by having a flee revolutionary Russia. Pope John Paul II, mother died when he was nine, brother three years later. Makes you think.
There is a sense in which choosing to play goalkeeper does show understanding that one is not as other people and certainly a grief and trauma can do that particularly in children. You make it except that your position is to be not the same as the rest. And what I consider proof from the BBC archives, childhood goalkeeper and solo violinist emphasis on the word solo, it's like a parliament. Four years old, polio.
I did football, I was goaly because I worked with crutches, I could stop the ball a little easier than the United stubbornly my feet with my crutches. And it's not again. And this time you don't know he shoots himself a terrific one. And Silla just makes it over the crossbar.
He just bent like an arm of a bow there and just deflected that one. It was going right for the top goal of that all the way and it was a lovely save by Silla. That was a grand shot, the grand save. When I see a great goal, it seems to me an incomplete experience.
You should have a great shot followed by a great save to be a full complete and rounded experience. I don't expect people to understand that. In fact, I hope people don't understand it. Being misunderstood is part of the goalkeeper's stock in trade.
You wouldn't be a goalkeeper unless you wanted to be misunderstood. How can I not be obsessed with failure? If I succeed, what have I done? What have I created?
Nothing. Even the poorest goals go into the record books. Great saves, I've forgotten. This could be a Panther's goal.
I love your eternal optimism. The Panthers get somewhere near the 18 yard box and gemstone thinking it could be a goal. That's four-neil at half time. He's in tears.
A Preston Panthers keeper's in tears. Poor lad. The gloves are off. He's crying.
Poor boy's crying. Under 16 football on a Sunday morning. Can you hear that? I tell you what it is, the great goalkeepers.
When all else fails, those guys in front of you, those 10 guys, need to look round and say, the goalie will save us. Now that's the difference once you acquire greatness, true greatness. And very few goalkeepers really acquire that aura about them. And one of the greatest, Gary Spreeks.
You know what, this just about sums it up. It doesn't matter that he gets hundreds of clean sheets. Forget the cup and championship success. Never mind that you save the blushes of countless dodgy defenders and there are plenty of dodgy defenders.
The thing that defines Gary Spreeks, the loneliest of all lonely keepers, is the goal he scored against himself in 1967. And he's not even Scottish. Go on yourself, Gary Sun. We were playing it a little bit one day and in three minutes before half time.
Crust him across the corner ball. Kelly Coop was on the left wing and he shouted to throw at him. Jess was going to throw at him, I seen Ian Caligian run through him, so I changed my mind. I've done it millions of times, just brought the ball back to my chest.
But on this occasion, I miss my chest and went on my shoulder and right in front of the cup. And Jess was walking off the DJ's as we dedicate this record to Gary. He has a corner just made this record, Kelly Sun. I left my heart to kill his head.
There you go, Jess, I'm in trouble. From Tabish, you're left to the shotgun, it's gone through labour, it's down to the left. What the hell are from? Yes, right.
You're from Estonia, the shotgun and Robert's in spelt, I forgot there's a net for the contest. It's right, right, right. Brad's shot from 25 yards and Carson was nowhere near it. Terrible, problem, problem.
That's the second half of that to start, and that's the Preston Panthers keeper walking back to his goal alone. Alone and four goals down. Do you know what? I wish I could say to you that I didn't know how that felt, I know how that feels.
Remember now why I stopped being a go-go keeper? Yeah, there's hands that can hold on to. Careless hands from Elvis Presley. Do you think he was a go-y?
He had to have been a go-y. No one could have captured the tenderness, the loss, and shame as well as Elvie. There's a lot of shame in his music here. It could have been forged between those two go-posts.
Oh wait, I am now being told that was not Elvis. Okay, forget it. Thanks to producer Adam Baller and the presenter of that piece, Hardy Sing Cooley. And it was a Landbrook Radio production.
It was originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4. I'm Chad Abumran. I'm Robert Grohl, which we hope to see at those live shows or at least at the next podcast. Hi, Radio Lab.
Hi, I'm Rady Mccarty. I'm from Washington, DC. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.
More information about Sloan at www.sloane.org. Okay, I guess that's it. Thanks guys. And this message.
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