Name: Goalies Have the Loneliest Job in Soccer, Here's Why
Uploaded: 2020-08-31T04:02:20.000Z
Duration: 3 min 50 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Arsenal goalkeeper, Arsenal legend, if you like.

And that was the buildup, the day before I started to get worked up about it.

By the time the bell went in the dressing room to go out, I was a bag of nerves.

And then I'd go down the tunnel, and I hit daylight and the 40 ... 50 ...  80,000 and went,

It's 11 players gelling together, understanding each other.

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.

They're the only individual in what is a team game.

There is an incredible loneliness about it.

The other 10 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.

On the reverse situation, you are putting yourself in this position where for 89 minutes 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.

Because it just makes you look a fool, an absolute total fool.

And everybody behind the goal goes home casting aspersions about your parentage.

You know you think about it, this thin tightrope that a goalie walks.

You're underneath your crossbar in between your posts, which is a massive area anyway.

People don't realize it's eight yards wide, and it's eight foot high.

And you are very capable of falling off at any opportunity.

All great goalies need a desperate sort of courage within their makeup.

When all is lost, when their defensive barriers and their structures and playing 4-4-2 or catenaccios, like the Italians do, When all else fails, those guys in front of you, those 10 guys, need to look 'round and say, " The goalie will save us. The big man will save us.”

And that's why I went head first, hand first, for the sake of winning a game of football.

You have the respect of all of your team.

And that was my greatest reward, and it's the greatest reward any footballer can ever get.