“Sometimes when you start a game with a good save, with a good feeling, you can feel that.”
That was David de Gea to MUTV seven years ago, on December 2, 2017, after producing one of the best goalkeeping displays in Premier League history when Manchester United beat Arsenal 3-1 at the Emirates, in a fixture they play again this week.
De Gea felt unstoppable in north London that day, and his 14 saves remain a Premier League record since Opta started collecting this data in 2003-04.
His display was also a vital landmark in the adoption of expected goals (xG), just a few months after the media had been given access to the metric. Arsenal ended that game with an xG total of 4.71 but were limited to only one goal, thanks to De Gea’s heroics.
The Spanish goalkeeper, now at Fiorentina, equalled Vito Mannone and Tim Krul’s tally for the highest number of saves in a Premier League win.
Mannone’s 14 stops were crucial in a 2-1 victory away to Chelsea in April 2014, when Sunderland were bottom of the league. It started a four-game winning streak which kept Sunderland in the Premier League for another season — and was Jose Mourinho’s first home Premier League defeat in 78 games as Chelsea manager.
As for Krul, he managed to keep a clean sheet after stopping 14 shots in Newcastle United’s 1-0 victory away to Tottenham Hotspur in November 2013. “As a young boy, you dream of games like this,” Krul told BBC’s Match of the Day after that game.
Krul’s outstanding shot-stopping display not only earned his side three points but also secured him another record. In the period for which Opta have game-by-game data (since 2003-04), Krul’s tally of 14 saves against Tottenham is the most by a goalkeeper in a single Premier League match in which he also didn’t concede.
🤯 @TimKrul‘s performance at White Hart Lane
🔙 #TOTNEW pic.twitter.com/CJUBgFLLOl
— Newcastle United (@NUFC) October 23, 2022
Behind him, Edwin van der Sar’s heroics in Fulham’s 0-0 draw away to Arsenal in November 2003 puts the Netherlands goalkeeper in second place with 12 saves. However, Van der Sar has another Premier League record centred around the number 14.
Between November 2008 and February 2009, the Manchester United goalkeeper set a new record for most consecutive Premier League matches without conceding (14) — a run which came to an end when Roque Santa Cruz scored against him in United’s 2-1 victory against Blackburn Rovers.
It takes a certain level of mental toughness to maintain this number of consecutive clean sheets or accumulate saves throughout a single game. This begs the question of how much confidence plays a part in a goalkeeper’s hot run, and vice versa.
“The biggest source of confidence is past experience. It can be past experience from previous games or from minutes ago,” says Dan Abrahams, a sport psychologist who has worked with multiple Premier League goalkeepers over the years.
“A run of clean sheets or multiple saves in the same game is going to bolster confidence, but the strongest mediator of this is whether the goalkeeper himself perceives that that helps. If they are processing that information and celebrating that.”
Throughout the years, Abrahams has always asked the goalkeepers he works with to make sure they are noting, logging and celebrating their success.
“It’s the processing of that information that is the mediator as to whether a run of clean sheets or multiple saves in a game actually impacts confidence,” he says. “If they just happen, but it’s not processed then it won’t necessarily make much difference.”
The record Van der Sar broke was previously held by Petr Cech during Chelsea’s 2004-05 title-winning season. In Mourinho’s first season with the club, Chelsea set a new record for the fewest goals conceded in a single Premier League season (15), and from December 2004 until February 2005, Cech managed 10 consecutive clean sheets.
“It was my first year here and there was a lot of pressure from everyone, talking about how I hadn’t conceded for a while and Peter Schmeichel’s record,” Cech told Chelsea’s official website in 2022. “My biggest advantage was that when I signed for Sparta Prague, I set the record in the Czech league by not conceding in 904 minutes.”
“I had only just turned 19 when I started breaking that record and everybody kept asking me about it. Every question was about when I was going to concede or if I could beat the record. Because I had gone through it while I was only 19 and broken the record, I had this experience with it.”
On that run, Cech felt that Chelsea had a massive advantage. “When you go into a game knowing the moment you score you have three points practically in your pocket, it’s a massive boost for your confidence and energy because you just have that belief,” he said.
Each successive save feeds the confidence of the goalkeeper, which creates a positive feedback loop.
“As overused as the saying is, being in ‘The Zone’ is something that athletes often refer to as the state where time slows down, focus heightens, and decision-making happens instinctively and automatically,” says Marc Sagal, a sport psychologist and managing partner of Winning Mind, which has worked with multiple clubs in the Premier League.
“Confidence reduces internal noise and anxiety and sharpens reaction times. For most ‘keepers, it’s all about trust and instinct, so anything that allows them to react and respond more effectively is huge.”
One season after De Gea’s masterful display against Arsenal, he came close to Krul’s record when he saved 11 shots in United’s 1-0 victory against Tottenham in January 2019. When asked by MUTV if he felt unbeatable against Spurs because he was stopping everything, De Gea agreed and said that he “was feeling well, especially after the first save”.
“When a goalkeeper is confident, it makes it different to the technical, tactical and physical side of the game,“ says Abrahams. “They are more aware of what is going on around them when they are more confident. They anticipate quicker and make quicker decisions.
“All of which is going to make a difference to their capacity to execute technically, and somebody who is confident is going to be physically better: stronger, quicker, more powerful.”
However, Abrahams points out that we should take into consideration the individual differences between goalkeepers when investigating how confidence affects their streak of saves or clean sheets.
Additionally, there are different ways to train the mindset of a goalkeeper to inspire confidence. One of them is the communication between the goalkeeping coach and the ‘keeper.
“If I am a goalkeeping coach, I am emphasising the importance of seeing confident actions. In training, I want them to execute their actions in a confident manner so they are feeling themselves evidence of being able to move, act, and execute confidently,” says Abrahams.
Visualisation and mental rehearsal are other psychological techniques that work for some athletes, as Sagal tells us. “I tend to focus on strategies that solidify a player’s connection with the abilities and beliefs that make them great,” he says. “I also think it’s critical to help develop strategies to cope with mistakes and failure so that there is a minimal amount of disruption to focus and confidence.”
Moving on from mistakes after the match or even inside the same game is a consensus among Premier League goalkeepers. In One: My Autobiography, Peter Schmeichel reveals he constantly brushed aside his mistakes — to the extent that in his mind he never had a bad game.
“Every season, in the league table, there was a number in our ‘goals against’ column which suggested that, yes, I had in fact conceded a few times — but these were not events I elected to remember,” said Schmeichel. “When I went into ‘risk mode’, I needed that feeling of invincibility. Of course, I analysed my performances; analysis and reflection make you better, but I did not do so thinking in terms of mistakes.”
That’s why on The Overlap’s Stick to Football podcast last October, Schmeichel jokingly told Roy Keane that he never made mistakes. “When I say, ‘I never made a mistake’, I mean that. I know I made mistakes, but I never accept that I would spend the next second thinking about that because there’s nothing I can do about that,” said Schmeichel.
“I have to now look that way (towards the ball) because if I start thinking, ‘I feel sorry for myself’, I will make the next mistake and then we will not win the game.”
There are different ways to mentally reset after a goalkeeping error, but the trick is to have a short memory. “Believing that the most important action is the next action is easier said than done, but it can certainly be trained,” says Sagal.
The goalkeeper talking to himself is one way to do that, by having some action-based words that trigger the reset, which shifts their attention away from the mistake and prepares them for the next action. When it comes to a cluster of matches, resetting objectives around the technical side of the game to things that you can control in the next match is another method, according to Abrahams.
Despite increased participation on the ball in the modern game, the goalkeeper’s role is still unique. When they are stranded for the majority of the game, waiting for the action to happen, and needing to come alive in key moments, the mental aspect is vital.
Hot streaks of clean sheets or multiple saves in the same game feed the goalkeeper’s confidence until he concedes. Then it’s all about resetting to prepare for the next action.
Every goalkeeper’s dream is to maintain that streak and feed the cycle of confidence as long as possible. When it comes off, like it did for De Gea at Arsenal seven years ago, it verges on sorcery.
(Top photo: Julian Finney/Getty Images)
