Goalscoring Goalkeepers and Why We Need More of Them

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.

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 Stuart Attwell despite the ball having crossed the goal line on the outside of the post.

It’s one of football’s favourite aberrations; the ghost goal. It’s a mouthwatering deviation from the usual contours and patterns that shape our game that, like a car crash, we can’t take our eyes off in spite of its obvious wrongness. It’s a ball hitting the corner flag, a player receiving three yellow cards or a goal scored off of a beach ball.

Last and most luscious on this list of divots is the goalscoring goalkeeper.

Chilavert became a cult hero off the back of his exploits in front of the opposition goal. In truth, there was something unusual about the way the Paraguayan kept goal anyway, with his cat-like movements and borderline psychopathic on-field energy seeming to come from a goalkeeping manual that he alone had read.

He raced into saves with arms, legs, body, face; whatever necessary to preserve his team’s score. Somewhere in this psyche, the obsession to preserve gave way to its natural counterforce, the will to create.

The moment in Montpellier against Bulgaria felt as significant then as it does now, as a moment when the World Cup’s baron record for goalscoring goalkeepers was at its most likely to fall—for this curious, subconscious itch to be scratched. There hasn’t been a goal scored at the tournament by a goalkeeper since, and there hasn’t been a likely candidate to assume the mantle.

Perhaps Chilavert was always an anomaly on this stage, where the stakes are highest and the margin for error least forgiving.

The Colombian Rene Higuita, made famous by the scorpion-kick save he made from Jamie Redknapp at Wembley against England in 1995, found out how it feels to be embarrassed by showboating on the world stage when Cameroon’s Roger Milla robbed him of the ball on the halfway line at Italia 90 to slot into an empty goal. Higuita himself was a mean goalscorer, including three for his country, but none came at a World Cup.

But the Colombian was the requisite level of daredevil to live the dream. It’s a dream every goalkeeper keeps inside of him, however staid his character and unlikely that it will ever surface.

LIONEL CIRONNEAU/Associated Press/Associated Press

In this sense, it gives a warm feeling when some of our more reliably pedestrian shot-stoppers find themselves on the scoresheet by little more than the virtue of doing their job.

Stoke City's Asmir Begovic had the high winds of an autumnal afternoon in Stoke to thank for carrying the ball over Southampton’s Artur Boruc in 2013, when his sweeping first-minute clearance gave his side a surreal lead.

Begovic, for his part, looked borderline mortified at what he had done to his colleague within the goalkeepers’ union, where the spirit of fraternity is perhaps more alive than in other corners of the game.

If goalkeepers who score are a delicious rarity, spare a thought for those who necessarily wear the burden of having conceded a goal to one of their peers. You imagine the chill of it gave Zdravkov an extra six inches of reach when the prospect dipped under his bar in Montpellier. Boruc was not so lithe amid the choppy gusts of the Potteries.

In all, there have been five goalkeepers to have scored in Premier League matches. Three of them were long balls forward that the universe had marked out a special fate, from Begovic, Paul Robinson (for Tottenham Hotspur over the head of Watford’s Ben Foster in 2007) and Tim Howard (Everton against Bolton Wanderers and Adam Bogdan in 2012).

Only Begovic’s strike had a direct bearing on the outcome of the game, with Stoke and Southampton drawing 1-1, but coming as it did in the first minute, much of the drama of it had ebbed away by the 90th. Howard’s Everton threw away the lead he had given them as Bolton won 2-1, and Robinson’s goal came in a 3-0 stroll.

True drama, though, comes when a hero in gloves makes the long dart forward at the death to rescue his team, the kind of devil-may-care bluster that would have Chilavert and Higuita reaching for their shooting boots through a nostalgic haze.

The Premier League has seen little of this. Peter Schmeichel volleyed in late for Aston Villa at Everton in 2001 in a 3-2 defeat—making Goodison Park the only Premier League ground to have witnessed two goalkeepers score—and Brad Friedel suffered the ultimate indignity when his last-minute equaliser for Blackburn Rovers in 2004 was wiped out seconds later by a winner for Charlton Athletic, with Claus Jensen rendering Friedel the footballing equivalent of the bride left at the altar.

For all its wicked tempo and knife-edge thrills, the Premier League could stand to be infused a little more with the spirit of Chilavert and Montpellier.