”What can be explained is not poetry.”
– John Butler Yeats –
When kids sign up for (mini) handball they play with a sponge ball, the game is fast, the result is not overly important and usually, everyone just comes to play. Their only idea is that they are friends there, the game is beautiful, it’s fun, they want to score lot of goals, they run,…
All but one.
Almost every group has that one Luka who knows what he wants from day one.
He wants to be a goalkeeper.
Everyone else wants to score a lot of goals, and he thinks like this: ”You will not score a goal if I am a goalkeeper.”
That is a true goalkeeper.
In time, most of his friends will want to be a goalie at some point. The best player in the group will do this when his team starts to lose, and everyone else every time the coach asks before an exercise:
”Who will be a goalie?”
They differ from Luke in that it is their desire at that particular moment, and for Luka it is part of the character.
His friends enjoy running and shooting, and he enjoys standing and defending, his friends win when they score a goal, and his victory is when they don’t score, his friends are afraid of the ball, and he’s not afraid of the ball and that’s the most accurate rehearsal every goalkeeper experiences in childhood.
When the ball hits him in the head, and when asked:
“Do you want to go out to sit on the bench?”,
Luka says in tears:
“No, it’s all right, I’ll keep being a goalie.”
And that cannot be learned.
With that, Luka comes to the first and every subsequent training.
Everything else we learn, practice, repeat, but the fear of the ball is instinctive and as over time, the shots become stronger, the fear, if any, becomes an increasing obstacle in the goalkeeping progress.
