Just two weeks ago we were mourning the death of England’s greatest goalkeeper, a man who did his job without fuss. It would be presumptuous to guess the reaction of Gordon Banks, were he still alive, to the behaviour of Kepa Arrizabalaga in the Carabao Cup final on Sunday but it’s hard to imagine any footballer of his generation not being appalled by the young Basque’s display of insubordination, for which he belatedly apologised on Monday evening.
It is not just the orientation of the Wembley pitch from north-south to east-west that has been radically modified since Banks enjoyed his finest hour on the turf now so arrogantly desecrated by Arrizabalaga’s refusal to accept his substitution. Chelsea’s payment of £71.6m to bring the 24-year-old to the Premier League, and the wages of £70m that he is due to receive over the seven years of his contract, belong to a different planet from the one inhabited by a man whose career began in the era of the £20 maximum wage.
It is possible to have some sympathy for the psychological strain imposed on young men set apart by sudden wealth without feeling that it can be used to justify Arrizabalaga’s response to seeing the electronic board with his number on it in the closing moments of extra time against Manchester City. Link that to the problems behind the scenes at Stamford Bridge, and the crescendo of questions about the squad’s faith in their head coach, and you have the ingredients of a belief that he could face down authority and get away with it.
Nobody comes well out of this except the referee, whose remit does not extend to enforcing a manager’s wishes on the field. Jon Moss allowed the sudden conflagration to burn itself out, and then got on with a shootout, which almost came as an anticlimax.
You could say that if Arrizabalaga felt he was not injured badly enough to prevent him taking part in the shootout, then he had every right to insist on continuing to do the job for which he had been picked. (Afterwards he compounded the offence by claiming that he had exaggerated his injury in order to give his team a respite). But not every substitution – these days, not even the majority – is enforced by injury. The system was introduced to avoid something like Roy Dwight’s broken leg reducing Nottingham Forest to 10 men early in the 1959 FA Cup final, but it evolved long ago into a sophisticated weapon of tactical rearrangement. And why should what goes for, say, a playmaker be any different for a goalkeeper?
Had Maurizio Sarri always planned to bring on Willy Caballero for the shootout, it would have made very good sense. The Argentinian keeper saved three penalties for Manchester City against Liverpool in the final of the same competition three years ago, and after moving to Chelsea he saved the first penalty in a successful shootout against Norwich City in the FA Cup third round last season. During his time as a City player Caballero would have become familiar with the penalty‑taking habits of many of Chelsea’s opponents on Sunday.
That alone would have been a valid reason for bringing him on at the end of extra time, even though Arrizabalaga had helped Chelsea to keep a clean sheet for 120 minutes. Football, particularly as conceived by men such as Sarri and Pep Guardiola, who watched events with amazement from the other dugout, is increasingly about the identification and deployment of specialised talents. But since the young goalkeeper had twice required treatment, apparently for cramp, in the closing stages of extra time, there seemed to be no other decision to be made.
Many years ago, Goalkeepers Are Crazy was the title of a collection of Brian Glanville’s football-themed short stories. Crazy, perhaps, but seldom this demented, and Arrizabalaga’s tantrum created two areas of risk for Chelsea. The first was that he increased the pressure on himself at a time when relaxed concentration would be vital. The second, and more important, would be that his little psychodrama disrupted his teammates’ focus in a moment when at least five of them would need every ounce of available coolness. And we saw how that worked out.
Sarri’s wild reaction heightened the sense of farce: screaming, scowling, gesticulating, making to leave the stadium but then turning back after the tunnel doors had opened to let him out, finally returning to his seat and – as always – taking out his notepad and pen, scribbling away with his head down, this time perhaps drafting his notice to Roman Abramovich or a letter to the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena in Naples, asking for his old job back.
You could blame Sarri for losing his control of the team and for not having a captain on the field capable of exerting it, but not for being angry. After a dull first half in which City’s lethal attackers were kept at bay, his players blossomed in the second period and must have been sorry when the interval before extra time disrupted their momentum. But you could also blame him for the presence of Jorginho – his chouchou, as the French say – whose limp first penalty handed the initiative straight back again.
Arrizabalaga was playing for Athletic Bilbao’s B team in Spain when Lionel Messi irritated Luis Enrique, then Barcelona’s head coach, by declining to come off late in a match against Eibar in 2014, with the team 3-0 up. The world’s greatest player was setting an example to a young man who would become the world’s most expensive goalkeeper. That, in combination with other factors, gave us yesterday’s farce: a moment in which the entire game was so lamentably disrespected.
The Guardian Sport
