Soccer Men (32 page)

Next comes Carragher. As he later discovers, he has been chosen to take for the wrong reason. Eriksson’s assistant Tord Grip will explain afterward: “He took one really well for Liverpool in the Champions League final.” But Carragher notes that although he has watched the DVD of the Istanbul match “a thousand times,” he has never yet spotted himself taking a penalty. “It’s frightening to think England’s assistant manager could be so ill-informed,” he comments. It’s hardly as if a penalty shoot-out in the World Cup were an unforeseen event that nobody could have planned for. How did the Swedes keep themselves busy in the six months before the tournament?

Nonetheless, Carragher places the ball on the spot—and scores! Unfortunately, the referee hasn’t blown his whistle yet. Carragher has to retake, and this time the keeper saves. Inevitably, Ronaldo scores, and England is eliminated again, before Cole gets his turn.

A nation mourns, but not Carragher. Sitting on the team bus waiting to leave the stadium, he receives a text message that says, “Fuck it. It’s only England.” Those are Carragher’s thoughts exactly. Of course he is upset, but: “Whenever I returned home from disappointing England experiences one unshakeable overriding thought pushed itself to the forefront of my mind, no matter how much the rest of the nation mourned: ‘At least it wasn’t Liverpool,’ I’d repeat to myself, over and over. I confess. Defeats while wearing an England shirt never hurt me in the same way as losing with my club.”

He thinks this is a typically Liverpudlian point of view. He recalls the fans on Liverpool’s Kop stand singing, “We’re not English, we’re Scouse.”
As he says, “I’m sure there are a whole range of social reasons for this. During the 1970s and 1980s, Merseysiders became increasingly alienated from the rest of the country. The ‘us’ and ‘them’ syndrome developed, and it’s still going strong.... There’s no affinity with the national team.” To Carragher, Wembley 1966 doesn’t mean England winning the World Cup. It means Everton winning the FA Cup. In 1986, ten minutes after Maradona’s Argentina had beaten England, “I was outside playing with my mates copying the handball goal.” As a boy he traveled around Europe following Everton, yet it would never have occurred to him to go to Wembley to watch England. It must be different for Londoners, he says. These are honest thoughts, the sort you don’t tend to read in the tabloids in the months before a World Cup.

Rooney gets over the disappointment fast too. In the locker room after the game, Eriksson tells him not to worry about his red card. “But I hadn’t,” Rooney tells us. “It was already history.” On the team bus to the airport, he sits next to Cole, tells him he is sorry, and says (according to Cole, anyway) that he will knock out Ronaldo the next time he sees him unless the Portuguese says he’s sorry. Yet Rooney doesn’t seem angry, more “let down” by Ronaldo. Then, according to Cole, “Wazza got out his mobile and tapped out a text to his Man United team-mate. By the look on his face, he was doing it through gritted teeth but he sent it. He texted something like: ‘Well done Ron!’ like he was being sarcastic or something, ‘All the best in the next round.’” Some English fans might have spent the next few years blaming Ronaldo, but Rooney gets on with his career.

Even after getting knocked out, Cole still believes the pretournament hype: “On our day, without doubt, we’re better than them, France, Germany and Italy. The world cup had our name written all over it, and it should have been our time. We should have won it. But we didn’t play well enough.”

So the reality of poor performances matters less than the greater truth of English superiority. Let’s leave it to a wiser man to provide the final judgment. “The real reason behind England’s short stay in Germany is simple,” writes Gerrard. “We were just not as good as we think we are.” It was “stupid” of him and the other players to go around “constantly claiming we could win the world cup.” It mustn’t happen again, he says. “In future tournaments, we must learn to be humble.”

Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out like that in South Africa. The golden generation is on its way out, and most of its books now fill the warehouses of secondhand Internet bookstores, waiting to be pulped.

March 2011

O
ne April afternoon in 1991, Ajax Amsterdam’s goalkeeper, a hulking bear called Stanley Menzo, limped off injured. When his replacement bounded on, you wanted to laugh. The twenty-year-old Edwin van der Sar was bigeared, rail-thin, and dressed entirely in purple, with tiny shorts. By way of warming up, he literally skipped around the penalty area. He looked like a particularly campy gymnast. Then he began to keep, and never stopped. Twenty years later, as Manchester United’s keeper prepares to retire at the end of the season, he has redefined goalkeeping.

The pre-Sarian goalkeeper—who still lives on in some of the more primitive regions of Britain—was a hulking bear who kept goal because he couldn’t play soccer. He could barely kick a ball in the right direction. He got applauded for spectacular saves. He lived up to the old adage that “goalkeepers are crazy.” He had a longer career than outfield players, but still tended to get out of the game in his midthirties before he began to look silly. Managers rarely paid him much attention unless he let a ball through his legs. But Van der Sar has changed what we expect from goalkeepers.

I’ve followed him for twenty years. We’re just a year apart in age, and he grew up five miles from me in the Netherlands. He looks just like the villagers we used to play against on windy Saturdays in the bulb fields, near the North Sea: At six foot seven, he isn’t far off average height for the region, and his long, pale, gloomy face, that of a Calvinist pastor circa 1872, is typical too. As a boy he liked playing soccer—as opposed to keeping goal—but never dreamed of turning pro.

Still, his coach at his amateur club spotted his potential. In 1988 Ajax summoned him to play an evening trial match for their second team. The
stadium was empty, except for a gaggle of the keeper’s friends who positioned themselves at one end with a banner that said, “Van der Sar in Oranje.” He’d end up playing a record 130 matches for Oranje, the Dutch national team.

When Ajax signed him, his old amateur coach got a finder’s fee of 1,500 guilders (then about $800) in an envelope. That was the going rate for a young goalkeeper. But quite soon, it became clear that Van der Sar was the goalkeeper that Holland had been looking for since the late 1960s. When Johan Cruijff and Rinus Michels first dreamed up the country’s distinctive style of “total football,” Cruijff had a vision of the perfect goalkeeper: an outfield player in gloves. It had always bothered Cruijff that the typical goalkeeper just stopped balls. It was a waste of a player, Cruijff thought. The goalkeeper should start attacks, passing like an outfield player. Wouldn’t it be perfect, he mused, if you could combine with eleven men rather than ten, and it just happened that one of them could save a ball when necessary?

Van der Sar was that outfield player in gloves, total football’s missing link. (David Winner, author of
Brilliant Orange
, the book about the Dutch game, muses that perhaps Holland should have taken the seven-year-old Van der Sar to the World Cup of 1978 instead of the hopeless goalie Jan Jongbloed, who ended up conceding three goals in the final.) Van der Sar, two-footed, adept at the one-touch pass, given to dribbling past opposing strikers when the mood took him, could have been a professional outfield player and perhaps more than that. At the World Cup of 1994, he played in the outfield in Holland’s training sessions in Florida and looked to be one of the better performers. Cruijff would later call him “Ajax’s best attacker.”

The start of his career coincided with one of soccer’s rare rule changes: After 1992, goalkeepers could no longer pick up passes from their teammates. That made a keeper’s foot skills more important even than Cruijff had imagined. Van der Sar pointed the way for his profession.

But he was a new model keeper in other ways, too. Traditionally, keepers got praised for their saves. Van der Sar tried
not
to make saves. He organized his defense so that he wouldn’t need to make them. Every save meant that something had gone wrong beforehand. He read the game so well, positioned himself so perfectly, that strikers seemed to shoot straight at him. You rarely noticed Van der Sar—he was quite a boring keeper—but he rarely let in goals, either. On the other hand, when he had to make a save, he generally did.
When other keepers discuss him, the point they return to is that he seldom errs. In Cruijff’s phrase, he is “very complete”—equally happy whether catching crosses, making reflex saves, or standing up in a one-on-one against the forward and forcing the guy to shoot at him.

He also had the perfect keeper’s temperament. The Dutch call him an
ijskonijn
, an “ice rabbit.” Van der Sar never seems to enter the emotional state of losing oneself that is characteristic of soccer. This goalkeeper isn’t crazy. Even after great victories, he has fought off teammates who grabbed him too boisterously during the celebrations. He says, “I sometimes see nice, quiet boys go nuts on the pitch. Then I think: they can say I’m a ‘dead one,’ but I don’t think those guys are 100 per cent.” Van der Sar rebuffs the emotion around him with a chilled irony that usually falls short of being actually funny.

Last, there was his shape: perfect for the modern game. The big, burly English keeper, who could fight his way through a crowded penalty area to a cross (think Arsenal’s David Seaman), was going out of fashion by the 1990s. Even in England referees were no longer letting forwards push and foul the way they used to. In the new genteel game, Seamans were redundant. The new model keeper had to be both a giant and a gymnast—a rare combination. Van der Sar has it, as does the era’s other preeminent keeper, Gianluigi Buffon.

His first career went brilliantly. Keepers are meant to start slowly, but by age twenty-four he had become Holland’s automatic number one and had won the Champions League of 1995 with what was practically an Ajax boys team. (It’s a tribute to that side’s youth and love of soccer that sixteen years later, four of its members still play professionally: Van der Sar, Clarence Seedorf at Milan, Nwankwo Kanu at Portsmouth, and Jari Litmanen for Finland and now in training with the Finnish champions HJK Helsinki, while Edgar Davids is currently on trial with Sheffield Wednesday.)

In 1999, generally considered the world’s best goalkeeper, Van der Sar agreed to move from Ajax to Juventus. The story goes that as he waited in the Amsterdam airport to fly down to Italy to sign, his phone rang. It was Alex Ferguson. Did Van der Sar fancy joining Manchester United? The keeper apologized: He’d already said yes to Juventus. For years afterward, as United
went through substandard keeper after keeper, Ferguson would regret having called Van der Sar a day late.

Van der Sar probably regretted it, too. His years at Juventus were his worst. For the only time in his career, he lost confidence and committed what the Italians called
papere
—keeper’s errors. The Italian media dubbed him Van der Gol, for “goal.” Juventus asked him to have his eyes tested. In 2001 they packed him off to little Fulham in London.

In Dublin on September 1, 2001, I was present at the nadir of Van der Sar’s career. Holland lost 1–0 to Ireland and missed qualifying for the next year’s World Cup. After the final whistle, Van der Sar strode off in what, by his standards, was a state of high emotion. He passed a small table that stood beside the field. It looked doomed. Van der Sar lifted a long leg to administer the coup de grâce. But then, instead of shattering the table, he lifted his leg an inch higher and merely flicked a plastic cup off the tabletop. That was Van der Sar: the ice rabbit with perfect footwork.

His best then seemed behind him. Fulham had assured him it was bound for glory, but the money dried up, and the former world’s best goalkeeper ended up spending four years at a West London neighborhood club. Manchester United and Arsenal seemed content soldiering on with substandard keepers. Whereas in the Netherlands a goalkeeper was expected to be an outfield player and in Italy an infallible shot stopper, in England little seemed expected of him at all.

Most soccer managers undervalue and misunderstand goalkeepers. When the sports economist Bernd Frick studied salaries in Germany’s Bundesliga, he found that keepers earned less than outfield players, despite mostly being older. They also command lower transfer fees: The British record for a keeper is a mere $18 million, paid by Sunderland for Craig Gordon in 2007. Perhaps the main reason is managerial ignorance. Even great managers like Ferguson or Arsenal’s Arsène Wenger view keeping as an alien craft, like flower arranging. Since they barely understand what keepers do, they are loath to pay much for them.

Finally, in 2005, Ferguson risked shelling out $3.5 million on Van der Sar. The keeper was pleased and surprised. At thirty-four, he had thought his career was winding down. He was looking forward to returning to the
dunes by the North Sea, where he’d play center-forward for his old amateur club. “Scoring goals is the most fun,” he says.

In fact, his career was restarting. At United he won three straight league titles, and, early one morning in Moscow in 2008, the keeper you barely noticed finally became the hero. The Champions League final between United and Chelsea went to a penalty shoot-out. Van der Sar had a bad record in shoot-outs: With him in goal, Holland had exited Euro 96, Euro 2000, and the World Cup of 1998 on penalties. If he’d mastered this one particular keeping art as he has all others, the Dutch would probably have won another trophy.

Chelsea had spotted Van der Sar’s fatal flaw: On penalties, he dives too often to his right. Chelsea’s first six kickers shot to his left. He didn’t save a shot. In fact, by this point he’d deserved to lose the shoot-out. However, the legendary slip by Chelsea’s captain John Terry saved United.

Then, after six penalties, Van der Sar figured out what was happening. As Nicolas Anelka prepared to take Chelsea’s seventh, the keeper pointed a giant glove to his own left. (This is where prose as a medium fails. I urge you to watch the shoot-out on YouTube.) “That’s where you’re all putting it, isn’t it?” Van der Sar was saying. Anelka froze. The keeper had found him out. Reduced to a bag of nerves, he hit a gentle shot at midheight to the keeper’s right. Van der Sar, smiling as he dived, stopped it. “That one, all-decisive save is yet to come,” he had said years before. Here it was. Later that morning, records United’s unofficial historian Jim White, the ice rabbit breakfasted on two small packets of Cocoa Puffs and a banana.