As the only position on the pitch where only one can play, goalkeepers are used to contributing away from the starting spot.
Header image: PAUL ELLIS/AFP via Burnley Express.
Top-level sport is presented as a cutthroat world at times, where each individual is ready to clamber over anyone who stands in the way of achieving their dreams.
As the biggest sport in the world, football is perhaps the most ruthless environment of them all. It can be a dog-eat-dog meritocracy where you are only ever a handful of games from your career entering a terrifying downward spiral.
Within the world of football, there is no position under more scrutiny than the goalkeeper. Sure, strikers are under pressure to score the decisive goals to win the game, but if they miss a chance another will come along. For the goalkeeper, a career can begin or end in a single moment. A world-class save can propel an unknown shot-stopper into the limelight. An unexpected mistake can kill a career before it gets off the ground.
However, there is one exception to this. An apparent ocean of calm in the churning sea of insanity that is professional football. That oasis is the role of the third-choice goalkeeper, who is something of an enigma in the modern game. In some ways, they could represent the punchline to a joke – when is a footballer, not a footballer?
When they are third-choice goalkeeper. The least likely player to get on the pitch who, in many cases, is something of a figure of fun to the outside world. But this does a disservice to their role in the side.
Take Tom Heaton as the perfect example. The England squad already had three goalkeepers in their Euro 2024 squad, and a goalkeeping coach in Martyn Margetson. However, Heaton has made the trip to Germany as a non-playing member of the squad, to support the three goalkeepers in the group.
England could have taken another coach, but elected to take an active player who understands the rigours of tournament football, to provide support and guidance to their playing squad.
Manchester City’s third-choice goalkeeper, Scott Carson, is perhaps the most notorious third-choice goalkeeper in the English game. Carson was a prodigious young talent when he broke into Leeds United’s first team in the early 2000s, before a move to Liverpool in 2005.
However, Carson’s progress to the top of the game was derailed by an infamous mistake whilst playing for England against Croatia in a Euro 2008 qualifier. Carson’s mistake was crucial in England's failure to qualify for the tournament, and, for many, his reputation never recovered.
However, to write off Carson is to write off a career with hundreds of first-team appearances in the top two tiers of English football. Carson moved to Manchester City in 2019 and has played just twice since making the switch.
However, despite a lack of regular first-team football, team-mate Ederson recently told FourFourTwo that Carson was the most loved member of the Manchester City squad. Whilst, admittedly, Ederson did praise Carson’s personality around the dressing room, he also highlighted Carson’s work ethic and the example he sets to everyone at the club with his application for training.
Speaking to the Manchester City website in 2022, Pep Guardiola was full of praise for Carson, claiming that the club’s young players would learn more from spending the day with Carson than they would from spending the same time with him. Guardiola explained:
“Every second he is training and every minute you get on the pitch and in the changing room [with Carson], you value.
“It’s like the young actors have to be with the old actors on the set. They are wiser and have the values of the profession.”
Roy Keane once famously questioned the value of having good professionals around the dressing room, asking whether all these figures do is keep their teammates entertained with card tricks. Yet, when the greatest manager of the modern era, famous for his exacting standards, praises Carson for the impact he has on the dressing room, it is worth stopping to listen and understand why the role is so important.
Inspired by the recent UK general election, I recently re-watched the BBC political satire The Thick of It. I was struck by the parallels between the seething, swearing party political machine, embodied by Malcolm Tucker, and a Premier League squad. To extend the metaphor, civil servant, Terri Coverley is the third-choice goalkeeper of the series. For the uninitiated, Terri does her best to coach and counsel those around her, from the politically neutral position of the civil service.
She is occasionally, reluctantly, thrust into the limelight to save the day, but just dreams of retiring and opening a tearoom to see out her days. It would be easy to paint the caricature of experienced professionals such as Carson as this type of figure within the dressing room, and perhaps Carson is counting down the days until he can spend his retirement baking scones in a café in an area of outstanding natural beauty.
But this distorted image does a disservice to these outstanding servants to their trade. In this industry there has to be room for emotion and the intangible. What makes the presence of a figure like Heaton or Carson so valuable is that their impact cannot be boiled down to a measurable statistic.
In those moments when the heat of battle is most intense, Roy Keane can’t dissect Carson or Heaton’s xJ (expected jokes) in the dressing room. However, when their teammates and manager explicitly single out their impact for praise, who are we to question that?
In Carson’s case, having tasted both the dizzying highs and bitterest of lows that football can bring can only help him to savour every moment that the game has to offer.
If that perspective can help to lighten the mood in the Manchester City dressing room when the pressure is greatest, or Heaton can squeeze an extra per cent from Jordan Pickford when his country needs him, then that impact is every bit as great as the action on the pitch.
