It will have been a long two weeks for Illan Meslier by the time Friday night’s match between Leeds United and Sheffield United rolls around.
There is never a good time to make the kind of high-profile error that saw the ball skip past Meslier and gift Sunderland an equaliser on October 4. But the fact that it happened in the last minute of stoppage time, taking the score to 2-2 with the domestic footballing void of the international break yawning before him, was cruel misfortune.
Any mistake by a goalkeeper is costly and unique compared to those made by outfield team-mates. The punishment is, more often than not, going to result in a goal for the opposition.
In Meslier’s case, regardless of whether a deflection or a divot made it more difficult to read, it cost his team points live on television. It is up to him, with the support of Leeds manager Daniel Farke, to rebuild his confidence and form. But how?
“That goal ticks every box,” says former Leeds and England goalkeeper Rob Green. “It changes direction so he’s got to change his feet. Normally, if it’s a spinning ball, you’d drop off and let it bounce further in front of you to buy yourself time to react. But because it deflects, he’s not got that time to react how he’d like, so it’s a perfect sequence of awful events.
“It sits with you for a long time. It’s the worst with the international break because you’ve got to let it stew. Mistakes will happen once in a while. It’s the self-belief that you have as a defence mechanism that helps you deal with something like that.”
Straight after the incident, Farke made clear that the 24-year-old had his support and the manager displayed this via a hug and providing space for his goalkeeper to process what had happened.
“It doesn’t matter if you are a goalkeeper who plays at a low level or the very top, that feeling of making a howler is exactly the same,” says Matt Pyzdrowski, The Athletic’s goalkeeping analyst and former professional. “It’s the worst feeling. How you’re able to respond depends on how much confidence you have at the time. If your goalkeeper is in form and they won’t be getting dropped and they’re confident, you just put your head back and laugh. It’s a moment of disbelief that that just happened and then you move on and get back at it.
“At the other end of the spectrum, when you don’t have confidence or there’s competition for your place or you’ve put in a couple of bad performances in a row and there’s a risk that you get dropped, it’s much more difficult to handle. Then you start second-guessing everything you’re doing.
“You question if you’re really that bad as a goalkeeper. Your whole body feels hollow. That approach from the manager to say, ‘Give him a hug, leave him alone. This doesn’t change how we feel about you’, is the best backing you could ever have. It’s then up to you as a goalkeeper to believe that and then go out and perform.”
While each goalkeeper will prefer a different approach, dissecting and analysing the mistake does little to help. For Green, who played 48 games for Leeds and knows the fallout that comes from high-profile errors, the key to moving on was fronting up to the mistake and trying to return to the present as quickly as possible.
“You have to tell yourself that it will only happen once in your career,” he says. “You have to say that this is the painful and horrendous side of goalkeeping. The more experienced you get, the more you understand that these things will happen.
“When you’re younger, you’re shell-shocked. You’re dumbstruck. I remember playing in a youth game and I made a mistake like that. When the manager gave the team talk at half-time his opening line was, ‘Whose fault was the first goal?’. And I literally couldn’t hear him. He said it over and over again and I was looking at the floor until he was right next to me shouting. I said it was mine and so he said that was it, done, we move on. He just carried on with the rest of the team talk. That’s dealing with it. The process that you go through is to get back to the present as quickly as you can.”
Playing the next match as soon as possible is a good tonic for most goalkeepers to help them process a mistake. But handling fan reaction, particularly in the age of social media stoking angry responses to Meslier’s mistake, is a challenge at that stage.
“I remember one specific error that I made in my career, playing against a rival in 2017 and it was late in the game, we were winning 1-0,” says Pyzdrowski. “They got a free kick, he hit a wobbler and my decision-making process was skewed. I hadn’t been playing well, I went to punch it, then to catch it, then to punch it. And my indecision made me punch it into my own goal. I’ve never felt so low as after that.
“Then the fans reacted. When your own fans throw bottles and garbage on the field and they are telling you to leave the club, that exacerbates the problem. You really feel like you have a hole in your stomach. You want to curl up into a ball and never play football again.
“Of course, before the whistle blows in the next game, you’re thinking about it a bit. But the key is not to think about it then. Just go out there and treat it as a normal day. At certain points in my career, that was really hard and there are points where people don’t realise how difficult that can be. That’s what makes the guys at the very top able to stay there.”
“You have to know that you’re on the pitch for a reason,” says Green. “That’s the confidence, or arrogance, of a professional footballer. You have to know that you’re the person for the job. You can pick out a person in the crowd if you want to and they could have made about 10 mistakes since they woke up that morning. You have to think, ‘I made one two weeks ago, it happened to cost us but I know that I’m the right person for this.’ You’re the professional, you have to deal with the next game so if you dwell on it you’re as guilty as everyone else.
“To be completely arrogant about it, you learn from it but if you have the confidence to crack on then if other people can’t deal with it and forget it, that’s not your problem.”
In Green’s opinion, withdrawing from public view into a bubble of self-protection can help. Staying away from Googling yourself or reading social media is crucial. There is no amount of practice that can prepare a goalkeeper for these moments — like Green’s mistake in the 2010 World Cup when the ball slipped through his hands in a 1-1 draw with the USA — but the response is within their control.
“It was such a freak occurrence in the way that it happened with the dip, the spin, the lack of time to readjust,” he says. “It looks so awkward but it’s very hard to recreate that. I remember in the World Cup, making that mistake, and then the next day they put on a training drill dealing with that exact same type of ball. You think, ‘Thanks, you’re opening a fresh wound right in front of me.’ But replicating Meslier’s is so hard. Do you get Junior Firpo to spin one off his head? You can’t. It’s a freak occurrence.
“To get back to it, you get through the next game. You get through one game, then two, then three and then you’re at the next international break with a few clean sheets. There’s only one thing you can do worse and that’s make another mistake. It’s not the big saves, it’s the basics. The big saves will take care of themselves.”
(Top photo: MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
