Goalkeepers are odd creatures. They battle with other goalkeepers for only one spot and there’s never any rotation. As Louis Van Gaal said before the game this weekend, ‘a goalkeeper is more concentration and focus.’
That’s why guys like Petr Cech can play 90 minutes every week and for an entire season for his club, and then suddenly become a bench warmer simply because there’s a new goalkeeper in the frame, and he plays all of the games now. It’s the only position in football where rotation is actually a bad thing, it diminishes focus.
It’s why some goalkeepers are destined to be number twos their entire career – Bob Bolder had a stint with Liverpool in the 1980s as backup to Bruce Grobbelaar where he played a grand total of zero games and left the club with a League winners’ medal, a League Cup winners’ medal, and a European cup winners’ medal.
Sergio Romero is staking his claim for the number 1 jersey at Manchester United in the same vain. For the last few seasons he’s been perched on the cold hard plastic of the substitutes’ bench, watching his side from afar.
He came to Sampdoria from AZ Alkmaar, where he won the Dutch league title under Louis Van Gaal. At this point he was establishing himself as Argentina’s number one goalkeeper too. He was then loaned to Monaco as the Ligue 1 club looked to strengthen their side to compete at the top of the table after their recent promotion to the big league.
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Romero would play only three league games for the Monegasque side and swiftly returned to Samp where he was backup to ex-Arsenal benchwarmer Emiliano Viviano.
Such is the life of the goalkeeper. Things are looking up, you move to a club with lots of money and ambition and think you’re going to challenge PSG for a title and play in Europe with one of the richest clubs in the world, only to fail to displace the goalkeeper who played for the team in the lower leagues.
Not that Monaco stopper Danijel Subasic is a bad goalkeeper: the Croatian number one kept 20 clean sheets and went on a run of eight games – and 842 minutes – without conceding.
Romero’s transfer to United was never going to garner the interest that the other signings did. Romero was not given the fanfare that the media reserved for Schweinsteiger and Schneiderlin, for example.
That’s not surprising, of course, but it does show what United fans and the media thought of him. Everyone thought this was the signing of a backup goalkeeper, one who Van Gaal knows and trusts, but nothing more than that. Just a capable deputy for David De Gea or, perhaps, Hugo Lloris.
But on the back of his performance against Spurs on Saturday perhaps he’s staking his own claim. With David De Gea seemingly being pushed closer to the exit door – although just because Van Gaal didn’t play him this weekend doesn’t mean he’s leaving – Romero may be called upon to step into the Spaniard’s shoes.
He didn’t look great in possession, he had a sliced kick out of play early on – which is forgivable under the circumstances – but his distribution wasn’t as sharp as De Gea’s or even that of Victor Valdes. In a Louis Van Gaal team, a goalkeeper’s distribution is probably even more important than his ability to actually keep the ball out of the net. LvG’s teams keep the ball, and if they have the ball then it doesn’t matter how bad your keeper is at saving shots: they simply won’t get any!
Well, that’s the ultimate, anyway. Chances are the opposition will get a few shots, just as Spurs did at the end of the game. Romero bailed United out with a couple of decent stops, and what’s more, he managed to get the ball away from danger rather than simply pushing it back in front of a welcoming striker. He’s clearly a man United can call upon in a crisis, like on Saturday, but is he the man for a full season?
If he isn’t, though there’s a problem for Van Gaal. It’s getting later in this transfer window, and no club will want to lose their best goalkeeper now. If United do, then they’ll have to find another one. But Spurs would surely be committing suicide to sell Lloris to United next week. Not only are United their rivals for fourth place, but where do they go to find a first choice keeper? Vorm is a capable deputy himself, but to lose Lloris and replace him with Vorm would be risky.
Romero, however, has a pedigree most backup keepers don’t have and Van Gaal knows this. If De Gea does leave, and if it is impossible to get a top keeper into the club in time, then Romero will do a job. If he can improve his distribution and keep calm on the ball then he’ll fit in OK to United’s team and Van Gaal’s method.
If he can’t do that, however, maybe Van Gaal will need to persuade De Gea to see out his contract and hope that his head can stay in the game.
Because if United are going to play the real Van Gaal way, and play out from the back at every reprise, then the goalkeeper needs to be up to it.
At present, Romero isn’t.
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