In blind football, there are ten of them on the field. But only eight have a mask over their eyes. In this sport reserved for para-athletes with a visual impairment, goalkeepers are an exception. Unlike their teammates, they do not necessarily have a visual impairment and can be completely sighted.
By being the eyes of the players, the goalkeepers help by providing information. However, the guidance is supervised: only on the last twelve meters in the defensive phase. Above all, care must be taken not to cause noise pollution during these matches that take place in silence.
“Avoid adding noise”
Alessandro Bartolomucci, one of the two goalkeepers for the French team at the Paralympic Games, explains it in an interview with Sport en France: “I am an additional source of information. My goal is to be a plus for them, anticipate as much as possible the situations that could be the most problematic, then concentrate on my role as goalkeeper. The simpler, shorter and clearer my communication is, the better it is to avoid adding noise on the pitch and creating problematic situations for the perception of the ball and the opponent.”
A task that is far from simple, insists Mexican goalkeeper Carlos Menchaca Salazar: “You bear a great responsibility, because your teammates listen to all the indications you give them. If you indicate something wrong, they will go the other way. That is why goalkeepers must be very calm and know how to give orders.”
For the uninitiated, it is easy to think that goalkeepers must stop all the balls because they are sighted. “It is often this cliché: if we concede goals from blind people, it is because we are too bad, comments the other French goalkeeper Benoît Chevreau de Montléhu for Release. The cliché is quickly outdated when we come to see the discipline.”
“Unpredictable”
In fact, their visual advantage is clearly offset by their area of action, strictly limited to a one-meter rectangle around the goals. Which is not much on a pitch of about 40×20 meters. Even with sight, executing the necessary reflex on a perfectly placed point-blank shot remains difficult. Especially since the opposing attackers are not without technique. And because they are blind, there is no looking towards a corner of the goal or particular positioning of the shoulders. The goalkeepers must therefore succeed in anticipating these intentions by having fewer clues at their disposal.
“I had preconceived ideas that the players wouldn’t be as skilled, that the game would be slower, but all that was dispelled in my first training session. The level of skill, the spatial awareness and especially the verbal communication between blind footballers is extraordinary,” England goalkeeper Dan James told Metro.
“And there is an element of randomness: the shots can go from almost anywhere. You can see a guy arming his shot, thinking that it will go one way, and in fact at the last moment a movement of the ball or of a defender will make the ball go the other way. It is unpredictable”, adds Alessandro Bartolomucci, also with Release.
Formerly among the able-bodied
To become the last bastion of blind football, there is no real path and testimonies often refer to chance. But the identification can be done in the lower echelons of able-bodied football, where goalkeepers, in a context of precariousness, have an acceptable level but a priori insufficient to climb the ladder to the professional world.
Alessandro Bartolomucci was playing in National 3 (fifth division) when he received a tip to join the French blind football championship. “While I was finishing my master’s degree in science and techniques of physical and sports activities (Staps) at the University of Bordeaux, I was doing an internship at FC Girondins de Bordeaux as head of goalkeepers in the pre-training center,” he tells Oise Weekly. One of the coaches at this centre knew someone at the French Paralympic Sports Federation, who had mentioned to him the need to renew the goalkeepers in blind football and was looking for good-level goalkeepers to try their hand at it”. Five years later, here he is, two matches away from a gold medal.
- RMC Sport
