Football is full of clichés which, although they make sense, never truly reflect their full depth when spoken aloud. One of them is that “a team starts from the number one”. I know – many will say yes, or no, or that it’s true – but honestly now, yesterday no one sat down to watch Sommer or Szczęsny; all the fuss was about Yamal, Olmo, Lautaro, and the rest. It makes sense: the aim in football is the goal, and the great matches are the 4–3s, not the 0–0s.
But then there are those moments when, even if you’ve let in three, you become the reason why even the most indifferent viewer from yesterday can suddenly understand that football is a sport of eleven players – and that attack and defence, especially since 1992, include them all. It’s on nights like last night, when the balls just happen to fall that way, and the number one becomes the hero – and with him, the percentage of kids deciding to stand between the sticks rises by 5%–10%, in a city, in a country, sometimes even across the whole world.
What’s paradoxical, though, is that while the creative player is responsible for his own artistry, the goalkeeper “needs” someone else’s action for his work to begin. That shot from Yamal had to be absolutely perfect for anyone to realise just how flawless Sommer’s save really was. Even in that other save, when he was already down to his right and somehow managed to stop a point-blank effort in the centre-left, the first comment from the commentary was: “he hit it straight at Sommer”.
There’s a gradual undervaluing of positions in football as you move from front to back, but the drop in appreciation for this one is a bit steeper than the rest – perhaps because, while few have ever played football and truly grasp what happens on the pitch, even fewer have stood beneath a 7-metre goal that feels endless compared to the size of the human body.
And yet there are these heroes who fill it – the eternal outsiders of the four lines and the three posts. They form a tribe of their own within football’s great tribe. They wear different colours, they wear gloves, they train alone – but they are footballers… and sometimes they’re the ones who win it for everyone else.
