The Goalkeeper’s History of Britain - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Chapman was brought up in North London. In the 1960s he played in goal for Leyton Orient juniors. He was a correspondent for the ‘Guardian’ and the BBC in Central America and Mexico, and now works for the ‘Financial Times’. He lives in London with his wife, daughter and stepson.

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In 1956 Peter Chapman was taken by his dad to the cinema on Islington's Essex Road on Cup Final day to watch Moby Dick, in which Captain Ahab, prostrate across the whale, disappears into the whirlpool that sinks his ship. In the Cup Final, the footballer of the year was splayed across the six-yard line in a swirl of limbs as he dived for the ball at the feet of Jimmy Murphy, Birmingham City's inside left, whose knee struck his neck. But the goalkeeper, Bert Trautmann, survived in true last-ditch style, becoming a legend across the country. For the first time since the war, Britain embraced a German because, although he was one of them, he played like one of us.

The whirlpool of continental influence had washed over Britain three years earlier as the Hungarian leviathan led by Puskas and Hidegkuti thumped England 6 – 3 at Wembley, the first home defeat ever by a foreign team. Everyone agreed that it would have been more but for the heroics of Gil Merrick, England's and Birmingham City's goalkeeper. By 1956 it was clear that the goalkeeper alone was holding the line for a fading imperial Britain against a new and baffling world order.

So when Peter Chapman makes his footballing debut in the Islington playground of Hanover School, he arrives armed with his mother's old dress gloves and images of Merrick, Trautmann and Manchester United's Harry Gregg, hero of the Munich air disaster who returned repeatedly to the burning plane to save those trapped inside. On a winter Monday, Chapman takes his stand alone, flings himself high to his left towards the taps on the toilet wall that mark his goalpost and palms the red rubber ball away off the brickwork and tarmac to disbelieving cries of 'E's fuckin' saved it!?'

A goalkeeper, from a nation of goalkeepers, is born. The Goalkeeper's History of Britain is a captivating mixture of allusive anecdote and observation from the streets of Chapman's gentrifying Islington to international arenas, which charts the changing nature of Britain and the country's peculiar visceral attachment to its goalkeepers. His search takes him from Hackney Marshes to the North Cape, from auditing the public conveniences in the Holloway Road to his selection for a Brazil XI led by Rivelino that had forgotten to include a goalkeeper. Chapman, a glorious amateur only but 'um goleiro inglês', steps in as the whole world – even the great Brazilians – acknowledges the supremacy of the British goalkeeper.

Acutely perceived, with all the angles narrowed, this is a delightful blend of personal crusade, intrepid search for the root of the national character and unique understanding of the country's postwar history. It is the world viewed through the utterly individual perspective of the lone guardian of football's precious estate: the goalkeeper.