Losing is probably the worst feeling you can experience as a goalkeeper. It sucks as a player, especially in a team sport, where you play as hard as you can and you come up short. Now, imagine if you will, a situation where no matter how poorly your team plays, you still feel solely responsible for the loss. Your team won’t score and players will make mistakes all game long, but if you miss one ball, you put your team down and you lose that single point you may have gotten…. Can you tell I’m a little competitive?
Now, this is the reality of goalkeeper. It is such a fickle thing. Goalkeepers aren’t measured in their successes; they are measured in their mistakes – something I have begun to grow accustom to. The worst part about all this is that it isn’t others that are holding me to my mistakes as a keeper, at least not yet. No, the one holding to my mistakes is myself. Every book I read, every podcast I listen to about goalkeeping, they all say the same thing. They speak about the perfectionism of Keepers. After all, that is our goal, is it not? We have to stay perfect and keep that score at 0 for the opposition. No mistakes, no goof ups. However, the faintest lack of concentration, the most fleeting of shots as the opponent lines up a shot, and that perfect performance is gone. It can happen in the first minute of the game or the last, but the feeling is the same…. Disappointment in yourself. Yet, the hardest and most essential thing for a Keeper to be able to do is brush yourself off after a “mistake” and face the next shot as if you’ve been perfect up to that point.
The dirty little secret about most Keepers I’ve met though, including myself, is that we all love being in that hot seat. We all love striving for perfection and love being the player under pressure in the last 5 minutes of the game. Need a job to get done, pick me for it. That’s the mentality that follows the role though I guess.
But, this is a site about chronic disease, sport/fitness, and fighting back, so why am I talking about this? Well, two reasons. The first is that I’m still stewing about letting in the worst goal I have ever let in last night and that’s the kind of thing that will eat a goalkeeper’s soul. Second, because it’s always good to remember when trying to achieve something that you are human, and we all make mistakes or take steps backward every now and then. Third, I want to discuss a really influential podcast that I heard a little way back, but has stuck in the back of my mind over the last couple of months. And lastly, as a way to introduce this three-part article series. Over the next three weeks, I will be releasing this full article in three parts titled “A Goalkeeper’s Lament”. It will be an accumulation of thoughts and experiences over the last year and a half of playing as well as drawing attention to a podcast that I found wildly fascinating regarding goalkeepers (in Part 2). Normally, I would just flat out give a link to the Podcast and let you all listen to it on your own, but I can’t find it anymore. I only lucked out by finding a saved copy on one of my old phones. At least this way I can still share the interesting stuff with you.
So there you have it, a bit of a game plan for the next little while. Like always, I have a bunch more of ideas that I hope to bring to AFL over the next little bit. This happens often, and a lot of the time, it’s true that they don’t materialize as planned. Sometimes they just simply get delayed, but are still in the works. I do truly wish I could do this full time, and make these things happen as I think of them, but all I can do is ask for your patience. As a full time student, a researcher, a coach, and an athlete, time is not always easy to find for some of the bigger projects I have planned, but I chip away at it here and there, with the hope that they will turn into something I can produce.
Thank you all for the support I have received so far, and for all those that tune in, read, and help learn about chronic disease.