Only the Goalkeeper to Beat by Francis Hodgson Macmillan 375pp, 12.99 in UK
It is a commonly-held notion in soccer circles that goalkeepers are lunatics: that you have to be crazy to take up goalkeeping in the first place, and that if you don't start out crazy, then you will inevitably become so after you've picked enough balls out of enough nets on dismal February afternoons. At a slight tangent to this notion runs another, a half-remembered, half-imagined idea which haunts the subconscious of anyone who has ever been involved, however slightly, in the actual playing of football - that it is always the fattest kid or the slowest kid or the kid with the grottiest knees who ends up in goal. Francis Hodgson will have none of it. His admiration for good goalkeeping is boundless. As a goalkeeper himself - "a good bad one, though certainly not a bad good one" - not only does he know the score, he knows what the score means. "The goalkeeper's whole job is to negate. He is there to do his utmost to prevent the very thing that everybody else present wants to occur. The most basic triumph of goalkeeping is the nil-all draw, the outcome everybody loves to hate . . . "
Hodgson argues that the contemporary cult of the goal - a plague, as he sees it, spread deliberately by television companies and especially those television companies who were responsible for selling soccer to the Americans in the run-up to the last World Cup - has led to a persistent under-valuation of the physical and psychological skills of the goalkeeper. He further argues that every change which is made to the game with the deliberate intention of allowing more goals to be scored, such as the ruling which prevents the goalkeeper from collecting a back pass with his hands, is a frontal attack on the keeper's position. What next, he asks - and then answers his own question: "the goalkeeper will soon not be allowed to collect by hand a throw-in from his own side."
The real question to be asked, here, of course, is this: how can you write 375 pages about goalkeeping, and not bore the boots off everyone? Well, Hodgson does it by writing with a light but passionate touch. He has a generous supply of funny stories and an ability to analyse the finer points of the beautiful game with a clarity which will astonish anyone - if there is anyone left - who thinks it is a simple matter of 22 men and a ball. Best of all, though, he waxes lyrical, at the drop of a hat, about soccer's unsung moments. Here he is on the moment every goalkeeper dreads: "When a well-struck ball hits the net it makes a peculiarly unpleasant noise. The knots at each junction in the mesh collide with the spinning edges of the panels in the ball to make a whirring, fizzing sound which goalkeepers most often hear in the fraction of a second before yodelling jubilation wipes out all other audible effects . . ." An articulate, amusing and opinionated book which deserves a wide audience.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times staff journalist