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In his ode to the men and women who perform the toughest job in the beautiful game, Uruguayan football poet Eduardo Galeano forgot about the people who have it worse than goalkeepers – their back-up.
"He wears the number one on his back. The first to be paid? No, the first to pay," writes Galeano about the goalkeeper in Football in Sun and Shadow.
"It is always the keeper's fault. And when it isn't, he still gets blamed. Whenever a player commits a foul, the keeper is the one who gets punished: they abandon him there in the immensity of the empty net to face his executioner alone. And when the team has a bad afternoon, he is the one who pays the bill, expiating the sins of others under a rain of flying balls."
