Join Blueprint for Football Extra to ensure that you don't miss future articles and get the full transcript of the interview plus a free e-book in the process. Other Blueprint for Football e-books available here (international version here). What do you need to be a top goalkeeper? Obviously talent is a necessity as is physical presence but what else? We spoke to Ruud Hesp, formerly a goalkeeper with Barcelona and currently the goalkeeper’s coach at PSV Eindhoven, about the various facets of the art of goalkeeping. The Most Important Ability A Goalkeeper Needs The thing that you need to have is to be stable in your head; to be able to get along with pressure. For me, for example, when I played for Barcelona I didn’t feel the pressure from the public and the press because I didn’t read the papers, I didn’t see the television and I was only thinking about my own pressure. I was only thinking about playing well and if I didn’t do that then people could only be disappointed but not angry because I knew that I was doing everything to perform well.
I trained well during the whole week. For me every training (session) was an opportunity to improve. So when I started the game I had the confidence of being prepared for the game. And then you need some luck also apart from the qualities you have. You have to be free in your head. Reaction After A Mistake What I try to give our goalkeepers at PSV is that you have to think about what happens. Briefly, but you have to think about it. What kind of mistake did I make? And it sounds very stupid but ask yourself: did I do it on purpose? No, I didn’t do it on purpose. So, people cannot be angry at me, they can only be disappointed. Then what you have to do is to analyse your mistake. Is it a goalkeeping mistake? Is it a positioning mistake, did you place yourself in the wrong spot? Did you come out when you shouldn’t have? Is it something with your feet that you did wrong? I can give you an example. When I played for Barcelona against Chelsea in 1998, we lost at Chelsea 3-1 so needed to win 2-0. We were leading 2-0 and I received a ball that I played badly. I wanted to kick it long but instead gave to the Chelsea striker Tore Andre Flo and he scored; 2-1. In the end we won and went through but at that moment we still had to play 15 minutes to score another goal. After that mistake, in the next minute Frank Lampard shot on goal because maybe he thought that I was insecure or my confidence had gone. And it was a ball that was swerving in the air. The ball came just to the right side of me, I got it and I held it. That was the first moment after the mistake.
Afterwards I was trying to analyse what happened and I realised that I had been able to analyse the mistake as one with my kicking, not a mistake of catching the ball. So I instinctively realised that a mistake of my passing should not influence my goalkeeping (shot stopping). And that is what I try to explain to our goalkeepers, even our youth goalkeepers. One mistake does not have to influence other parts of your goalkeeping. But that comes with experience. That’s difficult in the beginning. Training For Handling Mistakes You don’t know in advance but you can train. You can train it by putting the goalkeeper in those situations. In training you can play bad balls and if he makes a mistake then the next ball has to be good. And if you try to get the goalkeeper in a lot of bad situations then he has to react to that and do the good thing. So you have to bring him in bad situations to get him in a positive situation. In the beginning that is very difficult because they get frustrated but if that happens a lot of time then it gets natural and automatic reaction after they do a mistake. But that also needs a lot of experience. That is also why they say that a goalkeeper is at his peak after twenty seven years because by then he has played a lot of games, he’s had a lot of situations, so he knows what to do.
Ability With Feet And Hands Goalkeeping has changed and playing with your feet is important. But still what is most important is the goalkeeping with your hands, choosing position and things like that. So, what we try to do is to train the goalkeepers in playing with ball – passing and kicking – in exercises that involve goalkeeping. That means they have to shoot a lot, they have to play in position games and when the outfield players do passing exercises goalkeepers join them. It is also important for the players to know the capabilities of the goalkeeper in playing with his feet. So many times our warming ups include a lot of football actions because about ten years ago when it all changed everybody began to train the football things and not as much the goalkeeping things. And, in my opinion, that went too far. The most important is the goal. The goalkeeper is the only one who can use his hands so that has to be a hundred percent. He is also allowed to use his feet but that is secondary. So most important is training the hands and then the feet.
On Commanding The Penalty Area It is difficult and that also needs experience. But if you start training that aspect from a young age then you can develop it. Also, it depends on character. If you’re a quite person it is difficult for you to be dominant during the game. But if you want to succeed you have to. So it is important that they start getting that feeling from a young age. What we try to do at PSV is to give them some words that they have to use according to the situation. That way if they grow up or get to another team then they know what to do. At the same time the players know that they mean when they state those words. If you train that from a young age they get used to it. It becomes a habit.
When I started out as a goalkeeper professionally I was a quite boy but then I came into a team that was made up of very opinionated men so if I wanted to survive I had to do the same. So in order to integrate I had to do the same. I had to train myself because in those days, whilst there was a goalkeeping coach, he was only shooting balls to the goal. They were not working with a philosophy about how to improve the goalkeepers. Nowadays we have a lot of plans and we do a lot of logical things. In the old days we used to shoot balls. It was nice but now we try to be a bit more specific. What does a goalkeeper need to play well? We constantly ask ourselves that. Preparing For Big Games For me, if we show them pictures of opponents then we are not doing so to worry them but to remind them of the opportunity that they have. Wow, you’re going to face Messi! We show them their qualities and they have to be prepared for that. But we present it to them as a chance to do well, not a reason to worry. They get videos sent home so that they can be prepared but again it is for the opportunity to stop people from scoring. If you present it like that then the goalkeepers gets into the game with another feeling. You should never give the impression that the opponent is too good for you.
Special thanks to Thijs Slegers, the press officer at PSV Eindhoven, for his assistance in the setting up of this interview. Other snippets from the interview with Ruud Hesp are available here.
Goalkeepers, it is often said, are different. You have to be when in a game where the ultimate aim is to put the ball between the goalposts you dedicate yourself to stop it from doing so. There is often little glory to be had and the expectation that you are willing to do anything – including throwing yourself into trashing boots – to get hold of the ball. It is a tough, unglamorous and thanklessness job. So why would anyone decide to become a goalkeeper? “I wasn’t good enough to play outfield!” Ruud Hesp laughs as he recalls how it was that he picked up goalkeepers’ gloves for the first time. “I was always big. I started as a striker, moved to midfield and in the end I was a central defender because I was the biggest player and I could head the ball well so they moved me over there.” It is there that he would have stayed if fate hadn’t intervened. “When I was twelve years old I played at an amateur club and the goalkeeper was sick, the second goalkeeper had to play a table tennis game so they said ‘Ruud will you go in goal?’ because I was playing goalkeeper at my school. I played very well in that first game and they said ‘you stay in goal’. And I liked it. So it was a coincidence that I became a goalkeeper.” This seems to be the conventional path for most goalkeepers. The main difference for Hesp was that he was good enough at it to make a career out of goalkeeping. Most of this career was spent playing for mid-size clubs who often lagged behind the three giants of Dutch football. He was good enough to catch the attention of Dutch national coaches but call-ups never turned into appearances. Then, at the age of thirty two, he received a surprise call: Barcelona wanted to sign him.
Louis Van Gaal had just been re-appointed manager and it was on his recommendation that Hesp was approached. Barcelona had signed Vitor Baia the previous summer but whilst the Portuguese was at the time considered among the world’s finest goalkeepers not everyone was convinced. “Van Gaal had already tried to sign me for Ajax but there was Edwin Van Der Saar there and I knew that he was better than me. I didn’t fancy going to Ajax to be a reserve so I turned him down. Clearly, he must have thought highly enough of me that he mentioned me when he moved to Spain.” “After a couple of weeks, Baia got injured and I stepped into his place.” Hesp retained his place even when the Portuguese goalkeeper recovered – indeed, Baia was loaned back to Porto midway through the season - and he eventually went on to win two league titles, a European Super Cup and a Copa Del Rey in his three years with the Catalan giants. “Barcelona are the biggest club in the world and playing for them was amazing,” he says. After Barcelona he went into coaching and was the goalkeepers’ coach of the Dutch national side that reached the World Cup final in 2010. “When Edwin Van der Saar played his first national game I was the second goalkeeper,” he recalls. “When he played his last national game I was there as the national team’s goalkeeping coach.” By that stage, Hesp had started to put the experience that he had garnered to the benefit of others as a goalkeeper’s coach and the main current beneficiaries are the PSV goalkeepers, where Hesp works.
There is a particular moment where the benefit of this experience stuck out. “I can give you an example. When I played for Barcelona against Chelsea in 1998, we lost at Chelsea 3-1 so needed to win 2-0. We were leading 2-0 and I received a ball that I played badly. I wanted to kick it long but instead gave to the Chelsea striker Tore Andre Flo and he scored; 2-1.” “In the end we won and went through but at that moment we still had to play 15 minutes to score another goal. After that mistake, in the next minute, Frank Lampard shot at goal because maybe he thought that I was insecure or my confidence had gone. And it was a ball that was swerving in the air. The ball came just to the right side of me, I got it and I held it. That was the first moment after the mistake.” “Afterwards I was trying to analyse what happened and I realised that I had been able to analyse the mistake as one with my kicking, not a mistake of catching the ball.” “So I instinctively realised that a mistake of my passing should not influence my goalkeeping (shot stopping). And that is what I try to explain to our goalkeepers, even our youth goalkeepers. One mistake does not have to influence other parts of your goalkeeping. But that comes with experience. That’s difficult in the beginning.” The benefit of his experience played out even off the pitch. “Before Barcelona I played in Roda and we had a lot of foreign guys who couldn’t speak the language.” “They walked past supporters who wanted to speak to them but they couldn’t talk back. I always thought to myself that if I ever moved to another country I wanted to know the language because I wanted to speak to the people. And it is easier on the pitch.”
“So there was a translator who was always helping the new foreign players with the press conferences. He started doing the same with me for one month but afterwards I started doing them in Spanish.” “I made a lot of mistakes but afterwards the journalists came to me to tell me that it was great that I was doing so after one month. They appreciated it and they gave me tips of what to say in certain situations. So I started talking Spanish really quickly. And I also asked people. Speaking the language is very important.” Hesp is clearly passionate about his job and loves what he does but there he admits that being a coach is second best to actually playing. “As a goalkeeper you think you have control of the situation and you can influence the situation. As a goalkeeper trainer your influence lasts until the players get on to the pitch. Then it stops. That is the big difference.” “As a goalkeeper coach you cannot make corrections on the pitch. Then it stops. That is the big difference.” “When I started as a goalkeeper coach I was more nervous than when I was a player.”
“Being a goalkeeper is the most beautiful thing to do and being a goalkeeper’s coach is the second most beautiful thing to do. I enjoy coaching young players because they’re hungry to learn about the game and eager to hear what you have to say. I really enjoy what I’m doing at a very beautiful club.” At PSV he is tasked with coaching not only the first team players but also those players coming through the ranks meaning that he is tasked with continuing the rich Dutch tradition for great goalkeepers. “I think that it is because in Holland we spend a lot of time training goalkeepers. Even in the old days. In Holland everyone had his goalkeeper’s coach and that has been the case for a lot of years. Before other countries started having a goalkeeper trainer in Holland we already had that,” he says of this tradition. “We always thought in Holland that goalkeepers were very important and that they are the foundation of the team. You can have good players but if the goalkeeper isn’t good enough then you have a problem. A house is built on a good foundation. It is the same with goalkeepers.” “That is why in Holland we spend a lot of time on goalkeeper training. When I started my career in professional football it was only shooting at the goal but I got the attention.” “I’ve had a lot of goalkeeper trainers myself and now I’m doing it. It is good to have a goalkeeper coach because he sees and feels the thing you feel. For me (as a coach) it is much easier to see into the head of a goalie. A goalie can come to me and ask me things on why it happened and I can talk to him about it.”
“These days games are decided by details and having a good goalkeeping coach can be a very important detail.” “Today all players are very fit, they have power, and they are well conditioned. So in those cases you look for the details and it can help make you champions.” Special thanks to Thijs Slegers, the press officer at PSV Eindhoven, for his assistance in the setting up of this interview. Enjoyed this article? Join Blueprint for Football Extra to ensure that you don't miss future articles and get the full transcript of the interview plus a free e-book in the process. Other Blueprint for Football e-books available here (international version here).
