By Myles Palmer
A football team is ten players and a goalkeeper.
And the keeper is as important as the other ten put together.
If the signing of Feyonoord keeper Jerzy Dudek is announced tomorrow, as I expect, it will close a chapter for yours truly.
Because my Arsenal season bottomed out some months ago when I read a quote from Wenger saying (something like) : I was offered Dudek a month ago for six million but I turned him down because we don’t need him at the moment.
When I read that it was like being punched in the face and kicked in the groin simultaneously. I took it to heart and I never got over it. That comment was something that upset me more than Michael Owen’s winning goal in Cardiff.
I was shocked. I was angry. I was very, very disappointed.
Wenger had two keepers, Seaman and Manninger, who were not good enough and he had passed up one of Europe’s best, a 28-year old who is in his prime.
Dudek, who was No.2 keeper at Feyonoord when De Gooey joined Chelsea,became Dutch keeper of the year in 1999 and 2000, and a Dutch league winner in 1999.
I’ve always had a gut feeling that this Pole is the right player. Tony Adams once said, of George Graham, “The gaffer decided to buy himself a great goalkeeper.”
Ten years later Wenger has done the same thing.
Seaman’s book Safe Hands was an excercise in denial. It says : I’m still as good as ever. His interviews are an exercise in denial. They say : I’m still as good as ever. But anyone with eyes can see that Seaman has declined steadily over the last five years. He can still make great saves. He got a hand to Silvinho’s own-goal the other week, so his reflexes are still there.
But Seaman is not as brave or as agile as he was because no 37-year old is as brave or agile as he was five years ago. He peaked in 1994 in that Cup Winners Cup season.And of course he has NOT lost all the qualities that made him world class.
It’s a bit like Eric Clapton.Eric can’t play the guitar as well as he did in the Sixties and Seventies, but he’s still pretty good.
Why? Because if you’re as good as Clapton was,you never completely lose it. Same with Seaman.
22nd May 2001.