It is the nature of goalkeepers to watch games through their own specialist lens. As David Seaman has observed Arsenal’s season unfold, he has been particularly curious to see how Bernd Leno has quietly wrestled the gloves off Petr Cech. Seaman, whose own standards were forged out of winning nine major trophies during his time at Arsenal, has been struck by the way Leno has gone about his business over the last few weeks.
But there was one particular test that made the most vivid impression. Leno was blamed for a goal Arsenal conceded against Liverpool as he pushed the ball straight to James Milner. It was not the mechanics of the goal in itself that Seaman was interested in. It was how Leno dealt with his first moment of scrutiny in the Premier League spotlight that mattered more.
“You look at that and think: ‘Right, you have had a blip, let’s see how you react.’ That is exactly what I look for in a goalkeeper: how they respond after making mistakes,” Seaman says. “We all make mistakes and he has come back perfectly, full of confidence, showing a good strong character. I am really impressed.”
Leno arrived in the summer from Bayer Leverkusen for €22m (£19.2m), a club-record fee for a goalkeeper but, unlike his expensive contemporaries at Liverpool and Chelsea, he had to bide his time before the opportunity to assert himself in the team presented itself. Cech began the season as Unai Emery’s first choice. Leno was able to concentrate on settling in without intense pressure. According to Seaman, the first job for any new goalkeeper is to prove himself to his own group.
“The lads would have seen a lot of him in training and they accept you through that – it can work the other way and they can see how bad someone is! But that is the first thing you have to do, to get the respect of the lads. If they see it in training the next thing is the question: ‘Can they do it in a match?’ That’s more easily said than done. We used to have a lot of players who were great in training but just couldn’t transfer it to match day. They would get too nervous.”
The clamor for Leno to displace Cech intensified because of the sticky moments the veteran endured with the ball at his feet at the start of the season. Seaman disliked that debate. “What used to really annoy me was people saying: ‘He can’t kick it out.’ The ball was being played back to his right foot by the center-halves, which really infuriated me because he is a left‑footed player. They needed to take that into consideration. His goalkeeping was still brilliant and defensively we were still very weak. He was having four, five, six vital saves to make per game.”
After Cech suffered a hamstring injury Leno stepped in, having watched six Premier League matches from the bench. When Seaman began at Arsenal he walked into one of the most stable defenses in the history of English football. Leno has had no such luxury. Arsenal switch from a back four to a three, they have not had a trusted left‑back for the past month and they have been making do without two experienced center-backs in the long-term absentee Laurent Koscielny and, for a few weeks, Sokratis Papastathopoulos. Rob Holding is young and Shkodran Mustafi is prone to sudden errors.
Seaman empathizes: “It is really challenging because you don’t know what they are going to do. That’s one of the biggest things I noticed when I left Arsenal for Manchester City. I’d got a Russian as my left-back, a Chinese guy as my right-back, and two French center-halves who hardly spoke. It was a massive shock. It’s hard to predict what players are going to do when it is changing a lot, so you don’t get accustomed to habits as quickly as you should do. It helps when you know a certain player might not mark tight at set pieces, so you need to remind them, or might switch off when the ball is around the halfway line so an opposing striker could suddenly run clear.”
Seaman has seen enough quality in Leno to predict the 26-year-old can become a reliable presence in Arsenal’s goal for a good few years. “So far he has been brilliant. I don’t know what footed he is because he is that good with both. The only way you can tell is if he takes a goal‑kick. I am impressed by his shot-stopping ability and the other thing I like about him is he gets on with the save. He doesn’t try to make it look flash.”
Well, it takes one to know one and Seaman finds Leno’s placid approach familiar. There is a notable contrast to the antics of another German goalkeeper at Arsenal, suggesting Leno may be a sort of anti‑Jens Lehmann. “He is not a massive bawler. He just makes the save with no need to scream and shout. A little bit like me,” Seaman says, chuckling. “In my era, if you looked at Peter Schmeichel and myself you saw two totally different goalkeepers who did it right. I wasn’t a screamer and shouter. Schmeichel was. His way got the best out of him and my way got the best out of me.”
Seaman hopes cool focus stands Leno in good stead for Sunday’s fiery encounter with Tottenham. “When you go into a north-London derby there is all sorts going through your head,” he says. “There’s fear of losing. When I came I knew exactly what it meant to the fans but that brings pressure. The only bit of advice I would give is just play your game. Don’t try to do something different or you might spoil it.
“Looking at Arsenal’s overall picture the biggest thing that comes to my mind is confidence is back. We are not as tight defensively as I would like it to be. I want the goalkeeper to have nothing to do, or one or two saves. That means we are in control. But after a tough start to the season we have bounced back brilliantly. It’s a big month coming up and with confidence I think we will surprise a few people.”
(The Guardian)
