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Goalscoring Goalkeepers and Why We Need More of Them
- Updated: October 5, 2016
It was just another day in World Cup history when Paraguay faced Bulgaria on 12 June, 1998.
It was midway through a muggy second half in Montpellier, France, when Paraguay were awarded a free-kick around 35 yards from goal. Up to that point, there had been little to suggest that either side had the armoury to break a stubborn deadlock, until Jose Luis Chilavert stepped forward to place the ball.
The giant Paraguayan goalkeeper—decked out sharply in black and peach, with his gloved hands hanging calmly by his sides like great whaling nets—took two steps back, checked himself and launched his hammer of a left foot through the ball.
The spin he generated was irresistible, taking the ball on a wicked arc as it whipped high into the afternoon sun. In goal for Bulgaria, the balding and diminutive Zdravko Zdravkov wished for all the world for the roles to be reversed with his opposite number, that it would be the man-mountain Chilavert who would have to perform some feat of goalkeeping engineering to keep this wonder strike from nestling in its rightful place in World Cup history.
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Eight days later, Zdravkov would ship six against Spain as his side crashed out with a whimper. On that day, from somewhere, he summoned more athletic form, wresting the ball from beneath the bar with a desperate grab as Montpellier held in a collective gasp. At the end of 12 June, still no goalkeeper had scored a goal in a World Cup finals. The record stands today.
Sometimes, the most pleasing pattern is the one that defies any sense of order. There is something entirely satisfying about having our expectations confounded, especially when those expectations are towards something prosaic and routine.
In football, such everydayness is everywhere. It’s a centre-half trotting up for a set piece and nodding in a goal, or a forward nipping in behind a static defence and slotting through a goalkeeper’s legs. That’s football, and it’s great. But it happens half a hundred times a season and only means anything inasmuch as it fits into a context, be it of a game or a season or some other secondary narrative.
Watford against Reading was just another Championship game in 2008, coming early in the season with both sides looking for the bright start that might turn into a promotion push later in the year, and, on the day, it was set to be an indicator for how well both sides’ summer remodelling had gone.
So it was a big game, like tens of thousands of big Football League games before it. It’s best remembered, though, not for the result or the impact it had on the season, but for a goal that was given to Reading by referee …
