A revealing moment of the absurdity of the goalkeeper’s role during Newcastle-Liverpool.
The role of the goalkeeper is an intrinsic paradox. On the one hand it expresses the greatest conquest that the evolution of the species has given to man, the possibility of having prehensile limbs, and on the other the most profound aberration of a sport in which to exploit this gift that nature has generously given us provided is the most serious fault.
If playing football therefore appears as an anti-evolutionary thrust – carrying an object from one place to another without using what would make it infinitely easier for you – the goalkeeper’s role is expressed as an intrinsic negation of it. So does goalkeeping represent evolution in a sport thought to be primitive? Probably not, but it would be at least a curious way to interpret it.
It was a Complex week for Premier League goalkeepers: last Monday Pickford got himself pierced by Salah with aexit reminiscent of the moment your controller shuts down while playing FIFA; Saturday Back Martinezwho two months ago made perhaps the most incredible save in the history of football, in the space of a few minutes earlier conceded perhaps the most lame goal a goalkeeper can score, with the ball hitting the crossbar and bouncing off his back, and then he sees Martinelli exulting even before putting the ball in the goal he had left unguarded to go and jump into the last corner of the game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j25Tn7g8RNY
It’s hard to tell if Nick Pope saw all this and was somewhat impressed by it. It would also be strange given that we are talking about one of the most solid goalkeepers in the last few years of the Premier League, as well as the one with the most clean sheets this season – the first in Newcastle after almost six years with Burnley – but then again the more you climb the more you hurt yourself when you fall.
Newcastle had a very difficult game on Saturday. Liverpool are the only team to beat them in the Premier League and are two goals up after twenty minutes. On the first Pope doesn’t seem to know what to do: he goes out but doesn’t quite understand why and is almost surprised by Núñez’s control; he tries to get back to the center and opens his arms in a bizarre and ineffective pose to then melt as if his bones had liquefied. Maybe he’s hoping for an offside whistle – which isn’t there – or for an arm check from his opponent. The silent check of the VAR almost deludes him that he has gotten away with it before throwing him back into despair.
Three minutes after the 2-0 goal fate enters the scene in such a grotesque and violent way to suggest that this match was written by an American sitcom author with fake laughter.
Newcastle have a free-kick from a very tight position, at 35 metres. Trippier beats towards the goal but compared to usual, a particularly effective trajectory does not come out. Alisson blocks it and throws quickly for Salah who had already sensed the situation and had darted behind Dan Burn, who would have also seen him leave but who is perhaps the least suited person to chase Salah in an open field. The Egyptian is very close to the ball that falls, had it gone two milliseconds earlier he would have had a comfortable stop. Pope is further away, just outside his area. They aim for the same goal. Salah sets out to control it and lets it rebound at the trocar, perhaps with the idea of putting it back on his running foot but it’s an unfortunate choice because the rebound favors Pope who in the meantime is close behind him. It’s a seemingly easy situation for a goalkeeper: just push her out of her head and run as fast as possible towards her own goal. And he does exactly that.
Or rather, he tries to do this, because, perhaps misjudging his position, he finds the ball lower than expected and, instead of arching his neck upwards to push the ball out, he arches it downwards , with his face ending up blocking it, bouncing off it in a scene of pure slapstick comedy.
The result is not terrible: in the end Pope has the ball in his immediate availability. After all, what place is safer for a goalkeeper than that impenetrable cage bounded above by the chest, on the sides by the arms and below by the grass? The ball, however, would be escaping from its cage and what could be simpler than exploiting that immense evolutionary gift that is our upper limbs? Pope does the natural thing – or counternatural? In short, you understand – what could do: with his left arm he brings the ball close to his body. For a millisecond he knows he’s done the right thing before the rational side of his mind reminds him that he’s about ten meters away from where he would have been allowed to do this thing.
Pope then jumps, quickly removes his left arm, gets up quickly and kicks the ball away but also poor Kieran Trippier who in the meantime had made himself across the field to fall back. He hopes he got away with it but he doesn’t believe it. Salah, behind, is with arms outstretched and screaming almost in mystical fury. Anthony Taylor arrives ed expels Pope, who leaves the stage disappointed and looking down. Maybe it would have come out even worse than that if he had realized in that exact moment that the match he will miss due to disqualification will be the Carabao Cup final next Sunday against Manchester United – his club’s first final since 1999.
Mistakes like this are the ones that add the funny note to a role, that of the goalkeeper, in which every mistake is almost a death sentence. Pope’s is a tragicomic mistake that doesn’t cost Newcastle another goal and doesn’t seem to ruin the game too much for his team-mates, given that Newcastle, in the hour left, often comes close to reopening it, and will end up losing it precisely because of the two goal that Pope had conceded. On balance, the twenty-year-old Elliot Anderson will pay the price, whose debut as a starter in the Premier League will be brutally ended after twenty-four minutes to let in the second goalkeeper, Martin Dubravka.
What, however, this mistake should leave us, is a reflection on how man is a being who prides himself on his rationality, who imposes more and more rules, laws, ideas to defend it but who in doing so comes to undermine his own abilities. The hyper-rationalizing impulse of the human being has produced a sport that prevents him from exploiting a dowry that has allowed our ancestors to survive. And at the end, Nick Pope just acted according to nature. Not something we can blame him for.