THE GOALIE DID IT

Jun 28, 2010 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

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Albert Camus, author of L’Étranger (The Stranger) is a French-Algerian novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.  According to the Telegraph newspaper, “He is now recognised as a man who understood the true profundity of football.”
Camus once said, “All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.”  Camus was a goalkeeper and, according to the Telegraph, “There is something appropriate about a philosopher like Camus stationing himself between the sticks. It is a lonely calling, an individual isolated within a team ethic, one who plays to different constraints. If his team scores, the keeper knows it is nothing to do with him. If the opposition score, however, it is all his fault. Standing sentinel in goal, Camus had plenty of time to reflect on the absurdist nature of his position.”
When, England goalkeeper, David James, was asked his views on a Camus statement that one sentence will suffice for the modern man- he fornicated and read the papers or, as the interviewer put it, he shagged birds and then read about it, James did not agree.  When pressed to elaborate James replied bluntly, “I don’t read the paper.”
This, by itself, is not strange but James and other goalkeepers are much stranger than the fictional stranger that Camus wrote about.  The Sunday Times said of James, “It is unfortunate that, to many casual football fans, James is most famous — notorious, perhaps — for a series of dodgy haircuts. The story of his record-breaking 536 Premier League appearances is marked out not by wonder saves but weird and wonderful experiments in hairdressing — and although he has played for Liverpool, Aston Villa and England, most people may remember him mainly for playing about with his barnet (rhyming slang for ‘hair’)”.
At one point when James became a suicide blonde (he died by his own hands), fans chanted, “Urgh! Urgh! Urgh! He’s got bird (mess) on his head!”  After the blonde job, he went to red and then orange.  He later revealed, “The bleach had gone a bit wrong.  We were in Norway, pre-season, for Liverpool and I decided to go for a blue rinse. I was actually aiming for Sheila Ogden from ‘Coronation Street’… It went Royal Blue. I left it in, and we lost 4-0.”
James thought that Bruce Grobbelaar, the Liverpool goalkeeper charged for taking bribes to throw Premier League matches, was strange.  He recalled about Grobbelaar, “I remember one game when Liverpool were six-nil up, and someone handed him an umbrella and he just sat there by the post, out of the rain.”
James and Grobebelaar might be strange but there are some even Camus, with all his experience, could never have contemplated.  The UK Sun had this shocker about another goalkeeper, “MARRIED footie ace Russell Hoult has been filmed ‘roasting’ a blonde in a shocking sex threesome.  The clip emerged after a mobile phone used to video the romp was LOST.
“It isn’t the first time the 6ft 4ins West Brom goalie has been caught out on camera.  Eighteen months ago he sent a woman ten nude snaps of himself over his mobile.  In his latest own goal, Hoult and another man are seen having simultaneous sex with a pretty woman who is naked except for a skimpy black bra.”
Hout, the West Bromwich goalkeeper, was once cleared of sending indecent letters to a girl of 15 after his solicitor told JPs they were no worse than “saucy seaside postcards”.
A Brazilian newspaper reported, “Four players of the Flamengo football club were involved in a scandal with eight prostitutes after the team’s away match against Atletico Mineiro. Striker Marcinho, who is currently the top scorer in the Brazilian League, is being accused of verbal and physical attacks by two of the prostitutes Wednesday night after the match.”
The incident took place at the home of the team’s goalkeeper, Bruno.  Then there is the famous Dwight Yorke tape which is one of the highlights of the book, “Playing Away – The A-Z of Soccer Sex Scandals.” In 1998 Yorke teamed up with Australian goalkeeper and Manchester United team-mate, Mark Bosnich, in what was described as a “cross-dressing orgy”.
According to one report, “Yorke secretly filmed himself and Bosnich with four women in what can only be described as a cross dressing orgy. In it is Yorke having sex with one woman, while Bosnich leered at him from behind wearing a skirt, while getting another woman to spank him with S+M equipment to complete the bizarre tape. In the end Yorke threw out the tape and a Sun reader found it and exposed it to the world.”
There is the ex-Manchester City trainee goalkeeper, Ashley Timms, who was jailed for attempting to blackmail a colleague over a sex video and former Aston Villa keeper, Dutchman Stefan Postma, whose video with his girlfriend putting it (as they said) in the back of his net was all over the internet.
In this context of strange to weird, claims that the blunder by England goalkeeper, Rob Green, in the match against the USA was caused by his breakup with Canadian beauty, Elizabeth Minett, and Spanish goalkeeper Casillas was distracted by his beautiful girl-friend, reporter Sara Carbonero, and caused his country to lose, are tame in comparison.  What is not strange is that David James replaced Green for the second match.  What would James do that Green wouldn’t do?  Bet your life, it has nothing to do with reading the newspapers.
*Tony Deyal was last seen saying that even morally upright goalkeepers get punished.  When a goalkeeper was kneeling saying his pre-match prayers at the start of a game, Rivelino, the Brazilian player, hit one right between the uprights.

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