The principle of this series is simple: one day, one player, one gesture.

And all the rest.

The Penalty Dance

On May 30, 84, Liverpool clinched the supreme title for a European club and Roma became the first team ever to lose a final in their own stadium. 1 goal to nil at the end of regulation time, Neal opened the scoring in the thirteenth minute, but Pruzzo equalised before half-time. Then it was all over until the penalty shoot-out. Nicol opened the scoring for Liverpool and failed, much to the delight of the tifosi in the stands at the Stadio Olimpico… who froze when Conti, Rome’s first marksman, proved unable to do better. Bruce Grobbelaar, the Reds’ goalkeeper, had just pretended to swallow his nets like a plate of spaghetti…

He’s beginning to think that the short-range missiles that Alan Shearer and Matt Le Tissier have been unleashing on him all season in endless, muddy training sessions are not for nothing. The play list of shooters continues to unfold. Ian Rush’s moustache doesn’t waver and Liverpool takes a lead. Then it was Graziani’s turn, the star summoned to restore hope to an entire stadium unwilling to contemplate the worst. But then Grobbelaar suddenly goes limp in the knees, his legs wobbling, undulating in waves and improvising the penalty dance that was to become the hit of summer 84.

At a time when laws and rules are the rule (one shot for Roma, one for the Reds, and so on, according to an established order), the Liverpool goalkeeper introduces a break that is as radical as it is idiotic, in the sense that

the idiot is not habitual. His actions and reactions are unpredictable because they don’t refer to established rules. Nor do they oppose them. He doesn’t sow disorder instead of order. He simply makes his own connections. (Emmanuel Hocquard, Le Cours de Pise, Paris, P.O.L, 2018, p. 64.)

Apparently, by stubbornly occupying the center of his cage, caught up in a paradox of limp epilepsy, the dislocated Grobbelaar suddenly asphyxiates his body’s ability to send meaningful messages to the shooters, who are avid readers of such clues (will dive to the right, to the left…?). Such gratuitous gestures seem outrageous in the middle of money time. Bruce the skeptic, playing for the European title, not by choosing a side, left or right, as goalkeepers are taught in all soccer schools, but by claiming the right to stubbornly occupy the center with undulations of his whole body melting under the harsh light of the spotlights.

The first provocation is to strip gesture of its capacity to convey meaning, in favor of pure, assumed expressivity. The second takes the opposite route, reinstating a new, symbolic meaning on the ruins of the first.  First I eat my fillets in front of the camera like a plate of pasta, and, look, now even my legs are as limp as well-cooked spaghetti… The Liverpool goalkeeper seizes on television broadcasting and the power of the flat, literal image, blindly faithful to the reality broadcast live, on which he affixes a symbol powerful enough to overpower one after the other the AS Roma players, dazzled by a reflection that is part of the cultural code. « I told myself we were in Rome, where the national dish is spaghetti, so I made spaghetti legacies, » he recalls. The reasoning is purely rhetorical, piling up metonymies like so many concentric circles: we’re in Rome, Rome is the capital of Italy, Italy eats pasta: CQFD. Grobbelaar spins the postcard image of « Italianity » into transparent analogies in an essentialist, and therefore ideological, reading of Italy.

Italianity, wrote Roland Barthes in his famous analysis of a Panzani advertisement, « is not Italy, it is the condensed essence of everything that can be Italian, from spaghetti to painting ». Graziani’s penalty kick disappeared into the stands, but the cartoonish image of spaghetti legs remained.

Guns N’ Fun

Bruce’s childhood? In Rhodesia, i.e. nowhere on the world soccer map of the early 80s. A career soon meant exile, far from the cricket pitches that had almost been his favorite. He landed first in Vancouver, then in Crewe, before finally joining Liverpool in 1981 and its mythical Anfield Road stadium, whose foundation stone was laid just over a hundred years ago. His shirt will be green. Apart from that?  It is said that this Bruce was a great rogue, tossed around from court to police station at the end of his career, for matches he might have fixed for hard cash.

In his early days, he was criticized for preferring entertainment and fun to the sacrosanct principle of winning: « Here, it’s about winning », as his coach Bob Paisley regularly told him.

But Bruce loves grimaces and laughter: he can’t resist recording a sacrilegious parody of the sacrosanct You’ll Never Walk Alone, which for the occasion becomes a pitiful rap in which he introduces himself: « I’m your goalie, the number one », and which the 1988 charts happily soon forget…

It has to be said that he’s been through almost the worst. If it hadn’t been for a miracle he still can’t explain, he wouldn’t have come back alive from his military service, which he did in ’75, at the height of the Bush War in Southern Rhodesia, the future Zimbabwe. He killed, saw killing, but survived and protected the young lads in his squad, often reckless in their appetite to fight once and for all. For this reason, he was nicknamed « Jungleman », the man of the jungle, the bush and ambushes. The war scenes all look the same, but when Bruce recounts them in 2018 in his autobiography, he always sees them through the astonishment of the survivor:

The vehicle in front of you hits a landmine and three bodies blow out of the side of it, right before your eyes. It could have been you. Three meters ahead of you, a friend is shot. Not you. A helicopter dives towards the ground, trying to pick you up while others are shooting at you. The guy next to you is shot through the leg by a machine gun. There are so many things that could have happened to me, but didn’t. (Bruce Grobbelaar, Life in a Jungle. My Autobiography, Liverpool, DeCoubertin Books, 2018, ch. 5 – je traduis).

Two lives in one. It takes the river, the one that divides the city into two banks – Everton fans on one side, Liverpool fans on the other – to give a name to this double face. On the day of a friendly derby between the two clans, in a stroke of lightning lucidity, the Everton crowd dubbed the Reds goalkeeper « the clown ». Not only for his repeated antics, of course, but also for his shortcomings: heads, Grobbelaar the mustachioed joker; tails, Bruce the sad-faced keeper.

Top and Bottom

Grobbelaar couldn’t conceive of a lap of honor, no sooner had the end of the match been whistled, without some ridiculous headgear with which to adorn his premature baldness. The sombrero, of the worst effect, will often be his preference.

At the end of his first League Cup final, which Liverpool won 3-1 against Tottenham’s Ray Clemence, the Reds’ former star goalkeeper himself, he performed acrobatics on camera that smacked of the circus and its sawdust, walking upside down on his hands: « head over heels! » the sports commentator even exclaimed live on air.

The celebration astonished television viewers, even though Bruce’s custom before every match is to warm up by walking on his hands or sitting on the crossbar. This goalkeeper is definitely a buffoon, Bruce an idiot, a fool in English, who deserves the nickname that the English sports press amusingly bestows on him: the « Liverfool ». In fact, it’s the very essence of carnival as mundus inversus, « world upside down », that Bruce’s antics de facto reconnect with. His gestures illustrate the aesthetic category of the grotesque (a term that was the first translation into French of the anglicism « clown »), fond of inversions similar to those that Mikhail Bakhtine, in his anthropological investigations, might have placed at the heart of carnival ceremonies, the spirit of which he sums up in a laconic slogan: « down, upside down, front-back ». The goalkeeper has the privilege of using his upper body, his hands, when soccer, legally speaking, is only allowed to use his feet; he is the one who dives or falls into the mud to stop the ball that others have lifted off the ground or hit with their head.

Grobbelaar shows off, by taking the ball in his hands where many others would have boxed it, the privilege that remains unique to goalkeepers: to play with the hands with impunity when it’s forbidden to do so in the land of the « one-armed », as rugby players mockingly refer to footballers.  Since the very first edition of the Cup, a competition so dear to Bruce Grobbelaar’s heart that it won him a place in the land of great goalkeepers, the goalkeeper has been the only person allowed to grab the ball with his hands. For the rest of us, the use of the hands, once accepted until rugby and soccer were clearly distinguished, has become an unbreakable taboo or a temptation, a potential that cannot be realized: « The hand, in soccer, is a conditional. We could use it, it would be easier, but we promise not to ». Even at training sessions, aptly named « specific », Bruce swallows one shot after another, cushioning the shock of powerful shots with his recessed forearms and hunchbacked torso. He coils up. Instead of the hand of granite in a velvet glove, the one that repels, that of Lev Yachine, the man who saved 150 penalties, Bruce prefers the arch of his forearms capable of cushioning the power of enemy shots. Blocking the ball, to finally control its trajectory, so that it doesn’t cross the line – the front line – or the body: isn’t it said of a goalkeeper that he’s always liable to get a hole in himself?

His gesture is all about filling and suturing, Grobbelaar’s dive has no other aim than to reunite the scattered. Reuniting, reuniting these enemy brothers, goal and ball, finally reconciled in the same appeased immobility. Not to push everything away, not to suspect each ball of being the next dumpling to be disposed of immediately. Not to mention the fact that, on British soil, the laws of the game designed to protect goalkeepers from opposing charges are applied sparingly. So you might as well choose your side, that of the blocking goalkeepers: the « repelling goalkeepers », accustomed to boxing the ball and sending it straight back into play, run the risk of a clash in the air with these powerful centre-forwards, while the blocking adepts protect themselves, while facilitating the forthcoming restart. Because blocking allows you to relaunch.

Yes, but… not just yet. The Reds’ goalkeeper isn’t in the habit of returning whatever comes his way in the moment, whether it’s a tense ball or a bell-shaped one, because a match, he tells himself, only has meaning if it’s also a big one. So he willingly goes too far, his dive seems to go beyond the intended point of impact, but it was, we later understand, to better extinguish the violence of the shot with the curl of his coiled body. Grobbelaar belongs to the line of acrobatic clowns exemplified by the famous Jean-Baptiste Auriol, known as « the Birdman », who thrilled audiences at the Cirque des Champs-Élysées in the mid-19th century by leaping over eight lined-up horses, when he wasn’t performing inverted balances.

The parallel is all the more striking given that others have already enriched it with their own dual practice. Julien Darui, goalkeeper for the French national team in the 1930s, became a member of the Pinder circus troupe, where his famous dives were the highlight of a tightrope act that saw him « stop the ball on penalties taken by accomplices ».

Grobbelaar is no bulwark, not even a wall, as he feigns clumsiness, then stretches the time of the action to finally wrap and block the ball. The excessive élan surprised even the kop, accustomed to singing behind the goal almost every weekend: they feared a blunder, an ill-judged trajectory, a counter-pass or any other foul whose technical mastery, otherwise displayed and assumed, would so easily have dispelled the spectre. But it is precisely this dialogue with the spectators in the Anfield stands that feeds Grobbelaar. If he frightens, it’s to bring home the emotional depth of risk and even danger. Always the clown, he creates the possibility of a blunder, only to overcome it, making every save a triumph in itself. Bernard Chambaz identifies the real anguish of the goalkeeper in the anticipation of « the often irreparable consequence of a mistake », a hypothesis which, if we are to believe Philippe Goudard, academic and clown, meets the profound meaning of the clown gesture:

Failure, the consequence of risk, is very present in the minds of circus artists and spectators alike, and with it the idea of fault, decay, guilt and redemption. And with it, the idea of sacrifice, inherited from Christianity, where the officiant, the god, the sacrificed and the beneficiary of the sacrifice are brought together in a single person – who may be the artist. (Philippe Goudard, « Esthétique du risque : du corps sacrifié au corps abandonné », in Emmanuel Wallon (dir.), Le Cirque au risque de l’art, Arles, Actes Sud, 2002, p. 32.)

From Auriol to Grobbelaar, the angel’s leap finds its literal meaning, and it’s thanks to such a pointless expenditure of gratuitous agility that both acrobat and goalkeeper blur the reference points.

If Bruce is faking it, it’s when he himself creates the anguish of his disproportionate leap, so that the stop turns into an unexpected rescue, the epic plunge into a dramatic flight, where nothing serious was really happening.

The closed and the open

Though.

René Higuita, the Colombian goalkeeper nicknamed El Loco (« The Madman ») by his fans, illustrated once again with his famous « scorpion kick » the law of the jester goalkeeper capable of reversing up and down, using his feet as a third hand. Grégory Coupet, the emblematic goalkeeper of OL, king of the French league in the 2000s, was forbidden to allow a back-pass from his defence to look like a lob and therefore an own goal, and imitated him by doing the same with his head against Rivaldo’s Barça in 2001.

As luck would have it, it’s the same East German goalkeeper, Robert Enke, whose mournful story Bernard Chambaz recounts in his story Plonger, who has nightmares of Cerberus « terrifying souls as they enter the realm of the dead », and who, preparing his training bag, checks that he hasn’t forgotten his trademark gloves… Cerberus. The guardian of the realm of the dead, the dog Cerberus, straight from ancient mythological tales, needs his three heads, just as the goalkeeper needs his extra hand to ward off anguish. Cerberus fulfills a sacred mission: not to let the dead return to invade the land of the living. For this reason, of the eleven players on the pitch, the goalkeeper is the one who has a special relationship with the metaphysical:

Goalkeeping is an exposed position that encourages a more metaphysical relationship with the ball. Many philosophers and writers have been goalkeepers: Camus, Derrida, Cendrars, Réda, Montherlant, Conan Doyle, Barnes, Nabokov and others. (Bernard Chambaz, Petite philosophie du ballon, op. cit., p. 30)

The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, to use the title of the novel through which Peter Handke enters the mind of Joseph Bloch, a former famous goalkeeper, is merely a symptom of access to much deeper torments. And here, too, the keeper finds the clown, whose portrait Jean Starobinski paints in a similar vein: if the clown « is indeed the one who comes from elsewhere, the master of a mysterious passage, the smuggler who crosses forbidden borders », it’s because « every true clown emerges from another space, another universe » and that « his entry must represent a crossing of the limits of reality, and, even in the most jovial mood, he must appear to us as a revenant ». Bruce’s grotesque combination of laughter and despair is born of an awareness of death. The death he encountered in the jungle, but also in the stadiums that have marked his career.

Only the goalkeeper, because he comes from there, knows the true relief of the countries beyond this frontier, the goal line, which he must at the same time defend body and soul. He is this « metaphysical acrobat » who, as Dominique Noguez writes, rejoices, but with death in his soul, drawn into « this paradoxical coexistence within him of being and nothingness, of assumption and refusal, of adherence to life and flirtation with death« . Heads: Bruce Grobbelaar’s entire life lies in this liminal tension, his feet on a Maginot line, his goal line like a frontier that it’s his duty to defend, but which the game itself, on pain of nullity of the score, demands to see pierced on occasion. On the other side of the field: every goalkeeper’s back is filled with the chants of the crowd lining the bend. The in-between is his domain: « on one side the future, on the other the past ».

May 29, 1985, another final, another penalty kick, but this time Bruce’s mother had travelled from South Africa to Brussels’ Heysel stadium to see her son play for Liverpool. Boniek, the invaluable Polish winger bought by Fiat chairman Agnelli, was brought down on the edge of the box. Michel Platini takes off. Opposite him, Bruce who, on that evening in May 85, had no desire to do it again : his spaghetti-knees would not buckle this time, and the trunk of tricks remained closed.

It was Italy again that Bruce faced, no longer the superb Romans, but the industrious Turinese, the Juventus of Tardelli and Rossi, coached by Trapattoni. In the stands, some of the English fans recalled the chases they had been subjected to after the match by Roma fans convinced that they had been robbed of the European title exactly one year earlier. The dangerous game began long before the whistle blew, this time with its own rules and its own assaults on other frontiers: the grids that barely separate the groups of supporters of the two teams, including those of the Reds, embodiments of the « hool » culture determined to practice the famous « taking of an end ». Taking of an end », writes Mickaël Correia, i.e. invading the stands reserved for opposing supporters, became the most popular game in British stadiums during the Thatcher era:

In a society where social recognition is now achieved through individual success, collectively charging the rival kop, capturing their banners and flags and then hogging its end becomes, in the eyes of these precarious youngsters, a way of establishing the prestige of their group while remobilizing the social codes of the original rough working class: courage, virility, solidarity, camaraderie and communion through alcohol. (Mickaël Correia, Une histoire populaire du football, Paris, La Découverte, 2020 [2018], p. 271.)

When, as Peter Handke also points out in his text dedicated to the « world of the soccer ball », « spectators attribute to themselves the authority they lack in everyday life, they admire their own power ». So the accumulated frustrations, from social defeats to intimate renunciations, reverse their polarities to become vengeful power. In the bleachers of blocks X and Y, which spread their violence in the direction of block Z, where the tifosi have replaced the Belgian spectators initially expected, archaic rites of virile initiation and cathartic integration into the community are blindly replayed. On that May evening in ’85, the whole of Europe learned to pronounce a name, that of the hooligans, live on TV.

Against all odds, the Carnival and the mundus inversus dear to Grobbelaar were back, but for Bruce they took on a completely different meaning. If we are to believe Pierre Mignon, for hooligans, that is,

football does have a carnivalesque dimension: a match is a moment when the world is turned upside down. You turn it upside down noisily, singing, being obscene and drunk, but also by invading the pitch […]. (Cité par Mickaël Correia, Une histoire populaire du football, op. cit., p. 275.)

It’s another Carnival we’re talking about, for other madmen, those who make a match « a moment when we turn the world upside down » and its restrictive laws, as if to resurrect the calcio of the origins, the one that the city of Florence played in the Renaissance, in the midst of other festivities where carnival brutality was already trying to express itself as social revenge. Paul Dietschy rightly points out in his invaluable History of Football that the ball games at the origin of football, soule and street football, were played in France and England during consecrated periods: « around Christmas, on Three Kings’ Day or as part of the Carnival cycle, particularly Mardi Gras ».

Behind Bruce’s goals, however, the doors that could have freed the flood of spectators crushed against each other took too long to give way and a wall finally collapsed, suffocating the fans packed into human clusters. The weight of the dead on the back is all about finals and penalty shoot-outs, which will have carved out the career and life of Bruce Grobbelaar. When the gates finally collapse under the pressure of frantic fans, it is to crush the survivors massed below and add to the unbearable toll. Just behind Bruce, sitting on the athletics track where the pole vaulting events usually take place, a young man could not believe he had survived. The eyes of millions of television viewers were transfixed on this Liverpool supporter, livid and haggard, whose petrified face would pass through and freeze the two goalkeepers who met his gaze.

Four years later, on 15 April 89, the F.A. Cup semi-final took place, this time on English soil. Liverpool faced Nottingham Forest under a beautiful early afternoon sun and on neutral ground: the game was played in Sheffield, in the ageing Hillsborough stadium, not really ready to welcome, with its rusty turnstiles at the entrance, the crowds of big matches. 54,000 tickets had nevertheless been sold, which would not suggest that the stands were still strangely empty half an hour before kick-off. This is because traffic jams rage on the road, and many visitors arrive at the last minute, once their cars have been hastily parked in the adjoining alleyways. To improve access to the stands, it was decided to open a large gate that was usually closed. Just a few minutes before kick-off, a crowd of fans began to gather like a single man on the West Stand, in pens 3 and 4.

Grobbelaar doesn’t have time to play his favourite role, that of the clown straight from the circus or the resurrected Pierrot from the theatre. It’s 3.06pm and the game has already had to be stopped by the local authorities, who have their hands full. Bruce, for his part, has not been taking part in the match for several minutes now, because it is once again behind his goal that the worst happens and death, obstinately, returns to prowl around his back. On several occasions, he shouted to the woman police on duty to free the fans by opening the fucking padlocked gates. But you have to respect a limit, unless you get a counter-order too late. He should understand, the goalkeeper, the man on the edge, the white line to be defended against all aggression. But he is also the clown who is so close to the audience that he calls out to them in the stands or through the television camera, breaking the fourth wall of the performance dear to Diderot at the slightest opportunity: « his relationship with the audience remains remarkably direct. He often comes out of the play and comments on it, seeming to be part of the audience as much as part of the drama », writes J.H. Towsen of the clown. This is because the goalkeeper is this grotesque buffoon, because Bruce is this carnivalesque being who is supposed to take part in a spectacle which, by definition, as Bakhtin reminds us, « ignores any distinction between actors and spectators », and « also ignores the ramp, even in embryonic form ».

That evening, the spectators should have been able to take part in the « spectacle without the ramp and without the separation between actors and spectators » that is Carnival, and actually join the players in the middle of the pitch to escape the deadly movements of a crowd that had gathered and was soon suffocating against the gates. The pitch should have become once again a public square where opposites were ritually mingled, in defiance of convention and the rules – the very rules whose incomprehensible rigidity will keep the safety barriers closed for too long.

Bruce, incredulous and distraught, can only stare at a crowd of frightened faces. Panic spreads across the lawn, where so many corpses spill out. Amidst the screams, the emergency services improvised in the chaos and urgency, using advertising hoardings as makeshift stretchers. Ninety-six people died behind Bruce’s goal. The youngest victim, Jon-Paul, was no more than ten years old, and his cousin was none other than Steven Gerrard, two years his junior and future captain of Liverpool.

Since that day, the number 96 has become his signature. He inscribes it on every autograph he still gives, right next to his full name:

Bruce Grobbelaar