the top of the crossbar - and then thump back to earth like a sack of shit.
Exhilarating.
And it doesn’t happen often. There has to be that supremely rare combination of a striker’s shot - hit exactly in the right place at the right velocity, which just happens to match the absolute extent of your agility.
It happens maybe once every two or three years, so infrequently that I can remember every time. All the important saves of my life.
I begin my story with the penalty I faced in the 4th Division State League grand final for Dartford Town - Dartford Town in Sydney, where I grew up.
* * *
We were one nil up with seconds to go, when the fast prick on the left (that right winger with the long blond hair) managed to cut inside Dave Lennox and bore down on my goal from 35 yards, at an angle of 45 degrees. I’m always comfortable with that angle, so I could’ve murdered that idiot Lennox who chased the fast prick just far enough to trip him on the edge of the box. I fuckin’ had it covered.
Obviously, Dave gets a red card, and I have to face a penalty. Ninety minutes up. Our older legs tiring and dreading the prospect of extra time.
The fast prick is gonna take it, but I can tell from the way he averts his eyes that he’s trying not to look at his target.
That’s the secret to saving penalties - knowing that a penalty taker will always look at the spot he wants to hit the ball. The trick, is learning to recognise the real look from the various decoy looks he’ll try to sell you as he lines it up. There’s just the tiniest nuance of difference in the way he glances at the real target. If you can learn to spot that difference, then you’re more than halfway to making the save. All you have to worry about is whether he’s good enough to put the ball, more or less, where you know he wants it to go.
The fast prick with the long blond hair was good enough. I’d seen him glance at the top right corner, then drag his eyes away with an expression that would have endeared him to any poker player. If I knew my victim, he had already hypnotised himself and could no more miss the top right corner than fly though the air.
Well, fly through the air is exactly what I did. He was still a pace from the ball when I took off to my right - arcing my body like a high-jumper - and just got my outstretched palm to the pile-driven pill. It pinged off the crossbar and shot back into play as I slammed into the ground and bounced to my feet.
There was a great melee of players about the ball on the edge of the box, and then their great lummox of a centre half ploughed the ball into space, as the whistle blew. And I fell backwards onto my arse in ecstasy.
Ecstasy that lasted for about half a second.
The fuckin’ season was over.
* * *
Dave Lennox shook my hand for the seventeenth time as he returned from the bar, but then his face changed.
“Come outside, Eric. We need to talk.”
There’s an intimacy to “going outside”; it means secrets. We all remember the various times we’ve been asked “outside” by women. It always means sex somehow. But in a football club, “outside” meant politics.
Dave was the captain and club president. He loved a whinge, but after winning a grand final I was more than happy to indulge him. We left the rollicking, beer-soaked fag-fume of the lounge bar at the Ghost Gum Hotel and wandered out onto the dark terrace where the cold and the wood smoke made me think of England - not that I’d ever been there.
“Man, that was a fuckin’ great save, Eric,” he said for the 18th time. But his face was now strangely serious, as though he was no longer talking about the game.
“Thanks, Dave. I sure saved your arse.”
“Yeah, you did.”
He stared into his beer for a moment then, avoiding my eye, he said,
“Yeah, great save, Eric. But it was almost too good.”
“Eh?”
I was used to praise, and that day I’d had far more than my usual entitlement, but too good? Can there be such a thing?
“What the fuck are you on about?” I laughed, but I could tell that something was coming.
Dave stared at his beer some more, then looked up at me with pursed lips and said, “Look Eric, I know you’re still a top keeper, mate. It’s just that we’ve got a couple of young blokes comin’ through and… and unless we start to play ‘em, we’ll lose ‘em.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. I’d thought he was gonna ask me to stand for club president or something (absolutely the worst job in any amateur football club).
“So what if we lose ‘em,” I sneered. “Aren’t I still the best keeper in the club?”
Dave looked at me like I’d just stabbed him in the guts with a broken beer bottle, which was basically what I felt like doing after saving his blushes and winning the final for him.
“Yes you are, mate,” he said, between clenched teeth. “You are the best keeper in the club, and that’s the bloody problem. How much longer can it go on? You’re 40 for chrissakes.”
“I’m 39, Dave. I won’t be 40 for weeks.”
“You’ll be pushing 41 by the start of next season.”
“So? Pat Jennings was still playing at the top into his 40s. So was Neville Southall, Peter Shilton, Gordon Banks … Danny Malone. I’m still fit, Dave. If Calamity fuckin’ James’s still playin’, then Eric Judd’s got years left.”
He had the grace to grin, but said, “Piss off, Eric. You’re comparing yourself with professionals. The cream of the cream … in England! And it’s only the freaks who play into their 40s. Elite freaks who do nothing but train all their lives. They don’t fuck their bodies carrying fridges. You can’t even kick since you did your ankle last time.”
“I have a right to compare myself with professionals, Dave. I could’ve been one.”
I didn’t often pull out the big gun these days, but he’d asked for it. I was a legend at the club because in my youth I’d received an invitation to go to Old Trafford for a trial. The letter said that I could turn up whenever I was ready. And I still had that letter.
But suddenly Dave was no longer impressed.
“That was 25 years ago Eric, and you never went. You stayed here, and you’ve stayed too bloody long.”
I might have belted him, as I’d belted plenty of others in my time - on and off the field in the name of justice. But at that moment Shona came out onto the balcony and I had to behave. Dave, of course, recognised an ally and immediately pressed his advantage.
“What do you reckon, Shona? Isn’t it time yer ol’ man hung up the boots?”
Shona had been my girlfriend for seven years, living with me for most of that time. She’d been my biggest fan in the past, but she’d wanted me to retire
