ONE of the more common pieces of Liverpool trivia that used to be bandied about by those sad people obsessed with such things (ie me) was that Liverpool’s telegraphic address was ‘Goalkeeper’.
Younger readers may be interested to know that a ‘telegraph’ was a sort of prehistoric e-mail machine, whereby two people who had such machines could converse in written form over telephone wires.
The problem was that very few people owned such machines, so even those who could send them had virtually no-one to send them to, necessitating the dispatch of an ageing post office worker to act as an intermediary to deliver said message by hand. You couldn’t make it up could you? Anyway, I digress. The point about the ‘Goalkeeper’ address was that it was frequently used by columnists struggling for a story during international weeks (what?) to justify articles on Liverpool’s great custodians from Elisha Scott through to Ray Clemence and beyond.
Aberrations such as Frankie Lane and Mike Hooper were airbrushed from the club record books as the likes of Bert Slater, Tommy Lawrence and Bruce Grobbelaar were lauded to the skies. More recently, however, the mercurial habits of Westerveld and Dudek, not to mention Kirkland, have consigned such adulatory articles to the same dustbin occupied by the aforesaid telegraph machines, and the seemingly endless line of top-class keepers has been rudely interrupted.
These apparently pointless musings have been stimulated by the recent reports that Scott Carson seems set on making permanent his current loan move to Aston Villa, a transfer seemingly endorsed by Rafa and the Liverpool board.
Although Rafa would undoubtedly consider the £9million fee floated by the press as good business for a reserve keeper, especially when it looks like he might have to find £15m plus to secure Mascherano, nevertheless I suggest that he would do well to pause and reflect on the wisdom of this course of action. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not calling Reina’s form or ability into question; after a diabolical start to last season (punching the ball into his own net against West Ham; juggling with an imaginary wet fish to present Andy Johnson with his easiest-ever goal), he’s settled down to become a commanding presence in the box, an agile shot stopper and, after last Saturday, a budding play-maker too.
What’s more, at 25 he’s a relative nipper in the goalkeeping family, and could be between our sticks for many years to come. So why hesitate over letting Carson go?
Well, simply this: He’s good, he’s even younger than Reina at 22, and he’s English. This last point isn’t a rant against the plethora of foreign players in the club/Premier League at present, but a significant consideration from two angles.
Firstly, can we be totally confident that Pepe will not be tempted by the siren calls of Barcelona or Real Madrid should they come calling if he continues his current rate of progress?
And secondly, should any restrictions be brought in which limit the number of overseas players in the team (even given the doubts over the legality of such action) can we afford the risk of losing the man who could well turn out to be the England goalkeeper for the next ten years?
Should either of these possibilities come to pass in the near future, we could be faced with the choice of spending £10m plus for a replacement, or promoting the untried David Martin or the, er, interesting Charles Itandje. Ideally of course we could keep Carson warming the bench to guard against such eventualities, but this would probably attract the attention of Amnesty International for the detention of an innocent party against their will.
