MY NAME is Socrates and I am a goalkeeper; there, I've said it. Former team mates have also told me: “All goalkeepers are mad, but you abused that privilege”. Perhaps that's why I ended up swapping the perils of the penalty box for the peace of the Press Box. Or might it be that I obeyed that old chestnut: “Those who can – do; those who no longer can – coach; those who never could – write about it”.
There is a theory in football that the nations where the game is mainly played by the heart, for example Brazil, Uruguay and Scotland rarely produce great goalkeepers, whereas those nations who play mainly with the head, England, Germany, Italy, Spain appear to have a production line of great shot-stoppers.
Football isn't big on in-game statistics, perhaps because it is the most free-form of the popular team sports. In theory, a game of Football could consist of two 45 minute halves of non-stop action; this doesn't happen in other sports, where you get a concerted short blast of action between what are set-pieces. With this format, such as the six-ball over in cricket, it is far-easier to keep statistics, as a means of demonstrating which players are the most-productive.
For instance, we know that Denis Law scored 30 goals in 55 Scotland appearances, giving him a goals per game average of 0.55. Kenny Dalglish required 102 games to score the same 30 goals, giving him a gpg figure of 0.29. They are in the conversation about Scotland's greatest player, yet few of today's talking heads will include Hughie Gallacher – 24 goals in 20 games – 1.2 gpg in the conversation, because, none of them ever saw him play.
It's easy enough to discuss strikers, given, how often they put the ball in the net is the measure of how good they were. It becomes a lot more-difficult when the discussion turns to goalkeepers, the men whose job it is to keep the ball out of the net.
'Keepers are the ultimate back-stop, called into action only after the ten men in front of them have failed to do their defensive jobs. It is an unforgiving role. For instance, Frank Haffey, still with us, aged 86, out there on Queensland's Gold Coast, has for the past 64 years carried the stigma of being the man at fault in Scotland's 3-9 loss to England, at Wembley, in 1961.
It goes without saying, any goalkeeper who concedes nine goals in a game cannot have had a brilliant match. But, the reality is, poor old Frank was an easy scapegoat for the failings of others in the team that day.
The film of the game which is publically available isn't the best quality and the editing is poor, but, having watched the footage, I would say only one of the nine goals was down to a Haffey error; he might have done better at two others, but, the other six were down to mistakes made elsewhere in the team, which left Haffey totally-exposed.
Scotland were poor, I have personal experience of several of the outfield players admitting: “That day, I was rubbish, I simply didn't turn-up”, yet only Frank Haffey and Motherwell's Bert McCann, of the 11 on-duty were never again picked for Scotland.
So, Frank Haffey got a raw deal, but, he's not the only Scottish goalkeeper to suffer. We have a history of treating the glove-wearers differently from outfield players; they are more-harshly judged.
So, what might be our metrics for deciding who is the G.O.A.T. Of Scottish goalkeepers, and which players make the cut into this conversation?
Obviously, I cannot properly comment on the greats of the past – the likes of Jack Harkness, John Thomson, Jerry Dawson, Jimmy Brownlie, far less the legends of that Golden Victorian age when Scotland ruled the football world.
So, I have limited my search to the post-World War II period and come up with a list of the most-capped Scottish goalkeepers from that time. In order of being capped, these men are:
Jimmy Cowan, Tommy Younger, Bill Brown, Bobby Clark, David Harvey, Alan Rough, Jim Leighton, Andy Goram, Neil Sullivan, Craig Gordon, David Marshall and Allan McGregor.
In descending order of caps won, the order is:
Leighton – 91 caps : Gordon - 81 caps : Rough – 53 caps : Marshall – 46 caps : Goram – 43 caps : McGregor – 42 caps : Brown – 28 caps : Sullivan – 28 caps; Cowan – 25 caps : Younger – 24 caps : Clark – 17 caps : Harvey – 16 caps.
In descending order of goals per game conceded, the order is:
Harvey – 16 games – 11 goals conceded – av. 0.69 gpg
Leighton – 91 games – 71 goals conceded – av. 0.78 gpg
Goram – 43 games – 35 goals conceded – av. 0.81 gpg
Cowan – 25 games – 26 goals conceded – av. 1.04 gpg
Gordon – 81 games – 85 goals conceded – av. 1.05 gpg
McGregor – 42 games – 48 goals conceded – av. 1.14 gpg
Rough – 53 games – 61 goals conceded – av. 1.15 gpg
Clark – 17 games – 20 goals conceded – av. 1.17 gpg
Sullivan – 28 games – 36 goals conceded – av. 1.28 gpg
Brown – 28 games – 39 goals conceded – av. 1.4 gpg
Marshall – 46 games – 69 goals conceded – av. 1.5 gpg
Younger – 24 games – 36 goals conceded – av. 1.5 gpg
The goalkeeper's big thing is the “goose egg” - a clean sheet – no goals conceded in a game. Given that each goalkeeper played a different number of games, the fairest way to evaluate them by this parameter is to take their clean sheets as a percentage of games played, in which case, the order is:
Leighton – 91 games – 45 clean sheets – 49.6% clean sheets
Harvey – 16 games – 7 clean sheets – 43.75% clean sheets
Gordon – 81 games – 34 clean sheets – 41.9% clean sheets
Goram – 43 games – 18 clean sheets – 41.9% clean sheets
Clark – 17 games – 7 clean sheets – 41.2% clean sheets
McGregor – 42 games – 16 clean sheets – 38.1% clean sheets
Cowan – 25 games – 9 clean sheets – 36% clean sheets
Rough – 53 games – 16 clean sheets – 30.2% clean sheets
Sullivan – 28 games – 8 clean sheets – 28.6% clean sheets
Marshall – 46 games – 11 clean sheets – 23.9% clean sheets
Brown – 28 games – 6 clean sheets – 21.4% clean sheets
Younger – 24 games – 4 clean sheets – 16.7% clean sheets
There is an old football cliché: “You win as a team and you lose as a team”, in which case which of our dozen great goalkeepers has the best winning record with Scotland? Again, in descending order, the results are:
Cowan – 17 wins from 25 games – winning percentage - 68%
Harvey – 9 wins from 16 games – winning percentage - 56.25%
Gordon – 42 wins from 81 games – winning percentage – 51.8%
Rough – 27 wins from 53 games – winning percentage – 50.9%
Brown – 14 wins from 28 games – winning percentage – 50%
McGregor – 19 wins from 42 games – winning percentage – 45.2%
Leighton – 41 wins from 91 games – winning percentage – 45.05%
Younger – 10 wins from 24 games – winning percentage – 41.7%
Clark – 6 wins from 17 games – winning percentage – 35.3%
Sullivan – 10 wins from 28 games – winning percentage – 35.2%
Marshall – 15 wins from 46 games – winning percentage – 32.6%
Goram – 14 wins from 43 games – winning percentage – 32.6%
Perhaps the best metric of a goalkeeper's worth to his side is statistic which is extremely-difficult to find in Football, but is frequently quoted in another game – ice hockey. This is a goalkeeper's saves percentage – the proportion of the shots he faces which the goalkeeper stops.
Given how the quality of the defences in front of them and of the attacks they are facing vary, this is really, the only statistic that matters when discussing goalkeepers. The leagues such as the EPL and the SPFL do tabulate the number of saves each goalkeeper makes, but do not give this figure as a percentage of shots on target they faced.
So, lacking this crucial evidence, what conclusions can we reach from the above breakdown of the figures? Perhaps, only this, the fact that Andy Goram - “The Goalie” - an almost mythical figure among Scottish goalkeepers, while one of only 3 of the 12 men listed to have conceded fewer than one goal per game for Scotland, has the worst wins percentage – thereby proving, Jimmy Greaves, that scourge of Scottish goalkeepers, not least the above-mentioned Frank Haffey, got it right when he famously told Ian St John: “It's a funny old game Saint”. Or maybe – who'd be a goalkeeper, you just cannot win.
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