GOALKEEPERS will happily subscribe to the cliché that you have to be crazy to be in their club. Perhaps that plea of insanity is what allows many managers to escape a guilty verdict when it comes to their own questionable judgment about the men between the sticks.
Few truly understand what makes a good goalkeeper, a fact underlined this week as Celtic and Rangers wrote off around £4 million in transfer fees on two men who never achieved No 1 status at either club. Magnus Hedman and Jesper Christiansen waved goodbye to Celtic Park and Ibrox, hoping to repair their reputations in places where the scrutiny is not so fierce.
Neither goalkeeper justified the faith of the men who bought them. If the measure of a good manager is someone who owns up to his own mistakes, then Martin O’Neill may just have added another credit to his CV. Dick Advocaat is no longer around at Rangers to answer for his flawed judgment, and Christiansen’s departure at great expense to Rangers becomes a millstone round the Dutchman’s neck.
In these frugal days, it is no longer economical to keep a man around the club whose salary is in inverse proportion to his use to the team. Hedman said the need to secure first-team football before Euro 2004 was the reason for moving on loan to Ancona in Italy, but you can be sure that the need to offload his wages was just as pressing an issue as far Celtic were concerned. How could a club which has just made scores of lowly-paid employees redundant justify keeping a man who is paid £
17,000 a week simply to keep a spot on the bench warm? Rangers had already been down that road with Christiansen. The Dane, it is estimated, cost the Ibrox club £3.5 million in his three years there. In return for a man who cost a £1.7 million fee and £1.5 million in wages, Christiansen played just six games. He was allowed to go back to his native country this week for free — if that’s what you can call a £300,000 pay-off to settle up his contract 18 months ahead of schedule — to join Viborg.
Christiansen can cite the bad luck of having Stefan Klos in front of him. The German has not only been in such great form in that period, he has always been fit. That, of course, was not the case when Christiansen arrived in October 2000. Klos’s injury prompted Advocaat to acquire a goalkeeper for the Champions League: it was a panic buy. Christiansen had played just a handful of games for Odense, but after losing on his Rangers debut against Sturm Graz, Advocaat knew he had made the wrong choice.
Barely a month later, Rangers recruited Thomas Myre, on loan from Everton, to play in a Uefa Cup tie against Borussia Dortmund, and when Klos returned from injury, Christiansen found he had fallen behind young Mark Brown in the pecking order. The Dane was loaned out to Veijle in his homeland and Vfl Wolfsburg in Germany before returning to Ibrox this summer, still at No 3, only this time it was Allan McGregor who had supplanted him as Klos’s deputy.
Advocaat, though, had a bit of a track record with goalkeeping mistakes. One of his first assessments in taking over at Ibrox in 1998 was to swiftly jettison Antti Niemi to Heart of Midlothian for just £400,000. The Finland goalkeeper, of course, proved his undoubted quality. He simply needed a manager to show faith in him. His move to Southampton last season earned Hearts £2 million and Niemi is now one of the Premiership’s most sought-after goalkeepers.
O’Neill’s error of judgment came in trying to go to the opposite end of the scale when it came to augmenting Celtic’s goalkeeping rota. Instead of relying on a young, unproven goalkeeper, the manager picked up a ready-made World Cup goalkeeper straight from the shelf in the summer of 2002. Hedman had displayed his credentials in Japan and Korea and even came from the background that O’Neill favours most when it comes to purchasing: English football.
The Swede was supposed to oust Robert Douglas, but he played just ten games in his first season after his transfer from Coventry City because of calf and knee ligament injuries. Douglas’s error in Seville last May, which gave FC Porto the winning goal in extra-time of the Uefa Cup final, was supposed to signal the end for the Scotland goalkeeper.
Though he played a few times at the start of the season, Hedman was given the jersey just before the Champions League group stage. It began badly with that grotesque error in Munich that allowed Bayern to snatch a late win and culminated in the shot from Juninho in Lyons which crept under his body. O’Neill’s faith in Hedman had been cruelly exposed — and financially costly as qualification was torn out of Celtic’s hands.
Three days later, Douglas was back in the first-team. He has stayed there for the last eight games. Ironically, it had seemed as if the Scot would be the one packing his bags: he had instructed his agent to find him a club, convinced that he had no future at Celtic. How quickly things change.
O’Neill, of course, spent most of his playing career with his back towards the goalkeeper. Being a combative midfield player does not allow in-depth study of what it takes to be a top No 1. He was lucky in that he had the fortune to play with two of the world’s finest in Peter Shilton, England’s record cap-holder goalkeeper, at Nottingham Forest, and Pat Jennings for Northern Ireland. You could say O’Neill was spoilt.
