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simon harvey: goalfood's flashing blade pontificates

Goalkeepers and their perfectly spherical balls

Posted: June 9th 2010
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Where I work, at a University in the East Midlands, we have this shared e-mail news group made up of like minded people doing similar jobs in other universities around the country. Ultimately, we’re all competitors so we don’t blab about commercially sensitive information but for obvious reasons sharing information, best practice and warning each other of potential pitfalls, is beneficial to one and all.

Reading David James’ comments about the new Loughborough University-engineered 2010 World Cup matchball, the Jabulani (‘to celebrate’ in isiZulu), I can’t help thinking there’s a similar e-mail intranet serving world cup goalkeepers.

According to the manufacturers and those fine people at Loughborough, the new ball is perfectly spherical – a first in football history - having been made of “eight pieces of shaped synthetic material glued tightly together” (sounds suspiciously to me like something hurriedly put together by John Noakes or Simon Groom or Janet Ellis or Yvette Fielding or Konnie Huq or Joel Defries – see what I did there?). The new ball is made up of a South African-inspired design with 11 colours meant to signify the 11 players in a team, the 11 languages of South Africa. . . .yada yada, blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, after no doubt exchanging electronic messages on some world goalkeeper intranet (closeyourlegs.co.uk perhaps) the globe’s keepers appear to have got in early with their excuses for when they’ll have to fish the old Jabulani out of the back of their collective nets.

In a scathing attack the veteran England keeper (stock journo phrase warning) summons up all his vastly-experienced bile to describe the ball as “dreadful” and claims goalkeepers will be made to look “daft” by its swerving and dipping movement in the air  - since when have keepers needed balls to make them look daft? He says there’ll be goals scored in this tournament which simply wouldn’t have been scored in previous tournos – yeh, right so none of it, however bad it gets, is gonna be your fault Calamity, we get the picture.

David apparently told the Guardian that the players have been doing shooting practice every day (good sign) and that he’s been standing behind the goals watching the ball so that he’s well prepared (bad sign) – I usually find that if I play keeper and I stand behind the goal that dreadful net thing tends to get in the way of me getting my hands to the ball.

Anyway, hot on David’s comments the e-mail keepers pressing the panic button thread began to expand, France goalkeeper Hugo Lloris weighs in with: “This ball is a disaster - with this kind of ball people can score from “almost anywhere”. He says he’ll have to be alert all the time because these balls are too fast in the air and constantly change direction – so basically, he’s laying the foundation for a 3-0 drubbing by Uruguay in the opening fixture.

Not to be outdone, since his two rivals have already absolved themselves of any blame for poor world cup performances due to the dreadful ball fiasco, Spain’s keeper Iker Casillas weighs in with his serious concerns as does Brazil striker Luis Fabiano  - he obviously strayed onto closeyourlegs.co.uk by mistake after Googling a similar search for an entirely different reason, and then thought he could be the first striker to futureprooof himself against a dodgy scoring record and an early exit by the Samba Kings by blaming it all on a dose of the Jabulanis.

The engineers who made the ball at Loughborough claim the bladder should be the most consistent ever made after months of testing by experimenting with a wind tunnel and a robotic leg repeatedly kicking the ball at different angles and with different parts of the boot (presumably something like that robotic spring which rocks the chair in a glass case in IKEA which fascinates children and simple people). The researchers say the ball will allow quality players to express their skills and they say it’s far more likely that high altitude is to blame for any possible glitches so far observed.

But for god’s sake don’t tell anyone on closeyourlegs.co.uk about the high altitude stuff or the keepers may start another thread and nothing will ever be their fault again.

Simon Harvey has donated his fee for this feature to the Fatty Foulkes Retirement Home for Eccentric Keepers