I, Robot

by Peter Crouch

  I like the way that goalkeepers struggle to dive to save an own goal, so completely stunned are they to be fielding a shot coming from one of their own. They might wave a token arm, but more often they fall backwards slowly, or stand entirely motionless. It frames the frozen moment all the better. I like the hands-on-hips disgust, the hands-on-face horror, the arms spread out in silent appeal: what in God’s name was that? I also like the unconfined joy among the fans of the club who are the beneficiaries. They’re screaming but also laughing, pointing in disbelief at the culprit while also grabbing each other by the arm – did you see that?

  Even seeing the abbreviation ‘og’ coming up as the scores scroll across the TV gives me a little kick of pleasure. As soon as you spot it your brain starts whirring. What could have happened? A great adventure opens up in front of you, a series of wonderful scenarios. You hope desperately for a belter, one for the canon of all-time classics. If you see the goalkeeper’s name next to the ‘og’, it’s even better, because now a mere touch or deflection on the ball is no longer enough. Has he thrown it in? Has he done an unintentional back-header from a shot cannoning off the crossbar or post? Has he attempted a desperate clearance and somehow managed to kick the ball backwards?

  As a kid watching my dad play football, I would pile into the clubhouse at full-time, request a blackcurrant and water from the bar and watch the scores come in on Grandstand. The phrase ‘og’ initially confused me. Had legendary Coventry goalkeeper Steve Ogrizovic gone up for corner and stuck one away? It was all the more perplexing because I knew he had actually scored once, a long goal-kick against Sheffield Wednesday that bounced over the head of his opposite number Martin Hodge and into the net. With time I understood, and with time I learned to celebrate the sight with a shout of triumph. ‘Og! Dad, there’s been an oggy!’

  The own goal, prized as it is, is something of a rare species at training grounds. I can only think that the same desperation that is present in match-day scenarios is not there in practice. It also works the same way as it does for strikers; serial own-goal scorers can really get on a run sometimes. Richard Dunne scored ten in the Premier League, which even across the number of seasons he played is a magnificent run of form. Jamie Carragher managed seven, including two in the same game against Manchester United, the sort of hot-streak to make a number ten jealous. It’s still not as good as Aston Villa’s Chris Nicholl, who in 1976 scored every single goal in a 2–2 draw with Leicester – two for Villa, two for the Foxes. To his eternal credit he did it the right way round, too – first an ‘og’ to fall behind, then an equaliser at the right end, a second ‘og’ to seemingly ruin everyone’s day and then a second sweet equaliser. That’s what you call spirit. That’s what you call oggy guts.

  Own goals have decided big games. Poor old Des Walker with that bullet header in the 1991 FA Cup final, Gary Mabbutt scoring for both Spurs and Coventry in the final of 1987. Tommy Hutchison scored the only two goals when Spurs came from behind to draw with Manchester City in the 1981 FA Cup final. All those dreams Hutchison and Mabbutt must have had of scoring at Wembley. Then actually scoring at Wembley and thinking they would be the hero. Then scoring again to ruin their own day and everyone else’s.

  Mabbutt’s own goal in 1987 was unlucky, a straightforward looper off an outstretched leg. Hutchison’s in 1987 hit him on the shoulder as he tried to clear a Glenn Hoddle free-kick. Even Des’s own goal was only six yards out. But to be a true classic, you need much more.

  JAMIE POLLOCK, MAN CITY V QPR, 1998

  Everything about Jamie Pollock made sense. He had the right haircut for someone called Pollock. He had the right build, he played in the appropriately no-nonsense style. And yet for one glorious moment he transformed himself into a maverick genius, a player of sweet touch, of rich imagination.

  It’s midway through the first half. The score is poised at 1–1. Pollock is in absolutely no danger when he runs onto the ball. He’s got team-mate Mike Sheron ahead of him, although why he then flicks it over him like Pelé in the 1958 World Cup no one will ever know. Even having taken Sheron out of the game he has his goalkeeper Martyn Margetson ready to accept either a header or simply the ball, left alone after its initial clip. Yet Pollock is only halfway through his masterpiece. He now tenses all the muscle and sinew in his neck and lats and, with a perfect combination of power and placement, dinks the header over his keeper and into the net.

  It’s magnificent. It’s so casual, so nonchalant. It reminds me of Matt Le Tissier’s goal for Southampton against Newcastle – languid, lazy, totally in control. The technique is so cool and dreamy he could be Chris Waddle. Le Tiss, Waddle and Pollock: together in the same sentence for the first and only time, all thanks to the own goal.

  What makes it so special, beyond even those artistic peaks, is that had he tried it at the other end it could never have come off. He wouldn’t have tried. Jamie Pollock scored five goals in sixty appearances for City. None of them could be compared to Pelé. In the same situation by the opposition penalty area he would have panicked. Had the flick worked he would have blazed a volley into the stands, except the flick wouldn’t have entered his mind. He would have battered a shot away.

  The context is similarly perfect. Pollock had apparently spent the day before the game watching own-goal compilations on DVD. His wife had warned him off it, but – enjoying every second – he had pressed on. Had those gaffes somehow worked their way into his subconscious? I don’t know. But in true City fashion, the impact of the goal was huge. City desperately needed a win to prevent themselves dropping into the third tier of English football for the first time. Pollock’s masterpiece condemned them to a draw. It’s why for me it’s almost the perfect own goal. It’s multi-faceted, a work of art and a car crash all at the same time.

  FRANK SINCLAIR, MIDDLESBROUGH V LEICESTER, 2002

  This is just a wonderful finish. Thirty-five yards out, Ian Walker in the Leicester goal, a first-time curling clip into the corner of the net. What adds another layer of gloss is that it was the only goal of the game. And that Leicester had long been a bogey-team for Boro. In short, it’s a miracle goal.

  DJIMI TRAORÉ, BURNLEY V LIVERPOOL, 2005

  I played with Djimi at both Liverpool and Portsmouth. He was a good lad. On his day, he was solid. If that sounds like faint praise, he also scored a couple of beauties at the right end – one a curler for Liverpool against Steaua Bucharest, the other a thirty-yard volley for Seattle Sounders that smashes off the underside of the bar and in. He was part of the Liverpool squad that triumphed in the 2005 Champions League in Istanbul. He owns, and earned, a Champions League winner’s medal.

  None of that matters. You say Djimi Traoré to anyone interested in football and they will immediately see this miserable magnum opus and hear the Jackson Five-based chant that sprang from it. Like all great own goals it came from no sort of threat: a weak pull-back from Richard Chaplow, no strikers near to him, just a sudden inability to control his feet. It’s like the dark side of a Cruyff turn, except it was two Cruyff turns, both foxing himself. He can’t make sense of it, Jerzy Dudek can’t make sense of it. Burnley fans don’t know whether to laugh or invade the Turf Moor pitch.

  It killed him as a player. It was all anyone wanted to talk about with him at Portsmouth, although opportunities to do so were limited, because he used to commute each day from Paris – forty-five minutes to the airport over there, an hour through security, an hour in the air, half an hour from Southampton airport to our temporary training ground. He was never late, but his reputation was already shot to pieces.

  Don’t blame it on the Bišćan. Don’t blame it on the Hamann. Don’t blame it on the Finnan. Blame it on Traoré.

  FRANCK QUEUDRUE, BASTIA V LENS, 2001

  Franck Queudrue was not a pretty player. There was a point in his Middlesbrough career where the club were close to qualifying for the UEFA Cup through the Fair Play league. Franck’s three red cards and five yellows saw to that.

  There ar
e some left-backs who you might expect wonder goals from. Roberto Carlos. Philipp Lahm. Paolo Maldini. Franck was not one, which makes his forty-yard dipping volley in Ligue 1 all the more exceptional. I also like the fact that he blames one of his Lens team-mates afterwards. Because it’s always someone else’s fault when you batter one in from an impossible distance.

  CHRIS BRASS, DARLINGTON V BURY, 2006

  Brass had a fine career as a lower-league defender: 134 appearances for Burnley, 152 for York City. It’s his one season at Bury that represents his peak, however, thanks to an own goal so pure, yet so hard to dream up, that it deserves its place at the very top table.

  The ball is floated into the Bury box. Brass has it covered. He runs onto it, facing his own goal, clearly realises the danger of putting it past his own keeper, and instead opts for the over-the-head volley. He catches it sweetly – power, pace, timing. Right onto his own nose and back past the motionless goalie like an absolute bullet.

  You do something like that and you think your day can get no worse. You then ask the physio why your nose continues to hurt so much, and he informs you that you’ve almost broken it. With your own shot.

  LEE DIXON, ARSENAL V COVENTRY, 1991

  It’s a famous one, this, and rightly so. Dixon has all the time in the world. David Seaman is one of the best goalkeepers in the world. The Arsenal defence is famously stingy. And yet Dixon, with the peachiest of timing, dinks it up and over the astonished Seaman from thirty yards. Much like Pollock, had he tried it at the other end he could never have pulled it off. By trying not to do it, he made it possible. Get your head around that.

  ADRIEN GULFO, PULLY FOOTBALL V FC RENENS, 2017

  You won’t have heard of Adrien Gulfo. You won’t have heard of his team, Pully Football, and you’re unlikely to be familiar with the lower reaches of the football pyramid in Switzerland. Yet this may be the greatest own goal of all time: a heavenly set-up, a finish from the gods.

  The cross comes in low. Gulfo, rather than getting rid, turns his body and, with the outside of his right foot, flicks it high in the air. No striker challenges him for the ball as it begins to fall, which may be why he launches himself into the air for an overhead kick. It is all so perfect, so balletic, right up to the point when the ball sizzles off at right-angles, straight over the head of his helpless goalkeeper.

  It’s like Gary Cahill’s scissor-kick for Villa against Birmingham, mixed with Luc Nilis’s volley for Villa a few years before, but with a hint of Marco van Basten in Euro 88 and a general sprinkling of Cristiano Ronaldo. If it doesn’t bring a smile to your face, you’re either dead inside or the Pully chairman. The commentary online sums it up a treat. ‘C’est pas possible! C’est pas possible!’

  I can savour these pearls because I have been there myself. A year on from scoring the winner at Man City as Spurs pipped them to the final Champions League place, I scored at the same end in the same fixture, this time for the wrong team. City got into Europe, we did not. I was stretching to clear a cross, the ball hit my heel and it was in, a weird karmic reversal. Everyone was very nice about it, but the walk back to the centre-circle to take the kick-off that I had caused was a long one.

  I couldn’t complain. My first goal for Liverpool, all those eighteen games in, was probably a double own goal – first a deflection, then the Wigan goalkeeper Mike Pollitt palming it over his own head into the net. It still got given to me. And at least I wasn’t Jon Walters, scorer of two own goals in one match for Stoke against Chelsea. He was determined to do something about it, took a penalty and smacked it against the bar. He actually did well to get on the end of both goals. They’re a lesson in tracking back, not to mention finishing. It was the most cursed form of hat-trick possible, ending a seventeen-match unbeaten run at home, capping a 4–0 defeat, with the Chelsea fans serenading him at the end with ‘Super, super Jon …’ All we could say to him was that he could fall no further. Even had he buried the pen he still would have been a goal down.

  When there are deflections, when there is doubt, the own-goal decision rests with something called the Dubious Goals Panel. Dubious is about right, because no one really knows who they are and what they actually do. The panel is supposed to include former players and officials, but their identities are kept secret: the first rule of Dubious Goals Panel clearly being that there is no Dubious Goals Panel.

  They don’t bother with whether a goal should have been scored, or who should be given the assist. We don’t even know what evidence they consider, because they’ve never called the players involved to actually ask them. I like to think of them as a secret society, holding massive power over players they will never meet. A group of faceless men, taking away goals that mean so much to desperate strikers.

  Written into the rules should be a cash bonus for any striker who taps in a goal-bound shot that last came off a defender. It’s not like stealing a goal from a team-mate. It’s the opposite. It’s an act of selfless kindness. It’s a humane execution. In the same way, in the case of a deflected own goal, the supplier of the pass or cross should lead the celebrations. They have created the mistake, they should profit from the adoration that follows.

  It can be awkward knowing what to do if the stadium thinks you have scored and yet you secretly know it’s come off the bloke marking you. The tannoy announcer has awarded it to you. The crowd are going ballistic. You have team-mates climbing all over you. And yet something is holding you back – the knowledge that some TV analyst, somewhere in a distant studio, is at that exact moment watching back the goal in super slo-mo and uncovering your heinous deceit. You’re left with the bashful celebration: a modest nod, perhaps a handshake. Certainly no set-piece moves, no full-length dive or backflip. You can sometimes make something true in life by pretending convincingly that it is. Not in the Premier League. Not with Carragher watching on, trying to get others to overtake his second place in the all-time Premier League oggy charts.

  What we should never see – and what the new-look Dubious Goals Court should come down on like a ton of bricks – is when the scorer of an own-goal is tauntingly congratulated by the other team. That man is already in it deep. Do not shove his face in it. Have some common decency. Had a City player clapped in my face or patted me on the back after my own goal for Spurs I would have punched them in the face, and I am not a violent man.

  Own goals, funny? Yes, as long as they’re not mine.

  TACKLING

  I was not a natural tackler as a kid. I wanted to score goals, not stop them. I was keen to master overhead kicks rather than stand on someone else’s toes as they tried it themselves. The joy of football for me was swerving past a defender and cracking one in the top corner, not industriously cleaning up at the back before laying the ball off for someone else to have fun.

  I had to have tackling instilled into me, mainly by my dad. Do not bottle it. Get stuck in. Never show fear. My dad would rather I missed a tap-in from three yards than jumped out of a tackle. As a lifelong Chelsea fan who grew up in the era of Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris, he may well have disowned me had I done so. And so I took to heart the old adage so many of us are taught as a child: if you pull out of a tackle, it will only hurt you more.

  You get told a lot of things as a kid that turn out to be false. If you don’t go to sleep on Christmas Eve, then Santa won’t come. If you watch too much television you’ll get square eyes. As a child, I never saw anyone at school with square eyes. I had never seen any photographs of children elsewhere in the world with square eyes. There was, in short, no documentary evidence that anyone’s eyes had become square because they had spent too much time in front of the telly. That’s before we get to the issue of why they should go square, of all possible geometric shapes. Almost nothing in nature is square. Even the old TVs were 4:3 aspect ratio; they were rectangular, not actually square.

  Yet we believed it, just as we believed that if the wind changed direction while you were pulling a face, your face would stay that way forever. ‘Graham, wha
t the hell has happened to you? Was it the wind, Graham? I can’t hear what you’re trying to say, Graham, not with your mouth all twisted like that – are you saying it was a consistent westerly, so you thought you were fine, and then it threw the old reverse on you? Graham? Is that you now? Graham?’

  I still believe the adage about pulling out of tackles, even though the logic doesn’t back it up. Why would it hurt more if your foot wasn’t anywhere near the tackle? How could withdrawing from a collision be worse for you than being fully involved? But none of it matters. The adage is too embedded in me to be forgotten, and I am not alone. As a nation, the British love tackling. We love players who throw themselves around and we cheer a last-ditch tackle almost as if it’s a goal. A full-on 50–50, where both players arrive at exactly the same time with the ball flying straight up in the air, is as stirring a sight as our game can produce.