I first became aware of Peter Shilton when he kept goal for England against Poland at Wembley on 17 October 1973. It was, as it always seems to be, a ‘must-win’ game for England if they wanted to qualify for the World Cup finals in Germany the following year and Sir Alf Ramsey’s side were expected to be too good for the Poles. I was eight years old and watched the match at home with my dad, praying that England would do the business.
Shilts wasn’t having much to do that night while at the other end Jan Tomaszewski – famously called a ‘clown’ by Brian Clough before the match – had been performing miracles for the visitors. Remember, these were the days before we all had Polish plumbers. As far as we were concerned, they spoke a funny language, came from the back of some East European beyond and were there purely so we could give them a football lesson.
England were all over Poland and with all that pressure it seemed inevitable that a goal would come, so there wasn’t much to worry about as Grzegorz Lato broke down the left in the 57th minute. Norman Hunter went across to close him down near the halfway line and in the normal course of events ‘Bite Yer Legs’ would probably have sent him back behind the Iron Curtain in several bloodstained pieces. Unfortunately, the Leeds United defender must have left his killer instincts back at Elland Road as he decided to gently usher the ball out of play like a ballet dancer doing warm-up exercises. He missed the ball and Lato too, and off went the bald little bastard at high speed.
Even when he passed to Jan Domarski there wasn’t much danger. He got his low shot in before Emlyn Hughes could tackle him, but it was pretty close to Shilton and wasn’t exactly travelling at the speed of sound. Most goalkeepers would have been happy to just block the shot or push it away. But Shilton wasn’t an ordinary goalkeeper – it wasn’t in his nature. As he himself said years later, he decided to ‘make the perfect save’. All well and good apart from one fact – he missed the ball. Instead of simply getting in the way of the shot, he tried to grab the ball in those big arms of his, only for it to go under his body. Not quite what I would call ‘perfect’. Cue Polish delight and English misery. England managed to equalise from the penalty spot – about the only way they were going to score that night – but the draw meant it was an England exit from the World Cup. Exit Alf Ramsey soon afterwards too.
Even Hunter had to confess, ‘Peter Shilton should have thrown his cap on it. The shot wasn’t brilliant but it went under him. He should have really saved it, but it was my fault. I’ve never played in a more one-sided game and lost.’
They weren’t the only ones gutted. Imagine how I felt as a young kid having to pretend to support Scotland at the finals in Germany the next year. So you’d think I might have a little bit of bad feeling towards Shilton, but how could I? He really was one of the greats.
Whenever anyone starts discussing who was the best goalkeeper ever to play for England it always boils down to a ‘Shilton vs Banks’ argument. There’s no one else apart from Shilton up there alongside Banksie, and the way things are going with the shortage of quality English keepers, it’s going to be a while before someone comes along to make the argument a bit more interesting.
Banks and Shilton – the names seem to go together. It’s not surprising really. Shilton – who narrowly gets my vote – had been Banks’s protégé and followed him into the Leicester and then England goal, earning the great man’s seal of approval. He even followed him at Stoke City. I know a guy who went to the same Leicester youth club as Shilton when they were both aged about 11. My pal wanted to be a goalkeeper but was told, ‘We’ve already got one of those.’ Then Shilts appeared. He looked years older than he was and dwarfed all the kids around him. It wasn’t long before he was training with Leicester’s youth team and by his mid-teens he’d filled out to become a six-footer, and was already turning into 14-stone-plus of muscle. Now for a boy to take on youngsters five years older than him like Shilton did is remarkable, it really is, even if the guy is a goalie.
Shilton was such a prodigy that he made his debut in goal for Leicester at the age of just 16 in May 1966 – before England’s World Cup win that summer when Banks was one of its stars – and he kept a clean sheet against Everton. After that he had a career that most footballers can only dream of.
It lasted 30 years, during which he won a record 125 caps – including 66 clean sheets – but it could, and should, have been a lot more. For a long time his main rival for the job was Ray Clemence and at one stage they even alternated games under some barmy take-it-in-turns rota system. Now Clemence was a good keeper too, but not in Shilton’s league if you ask me, so if you take into account the 61 caps he won, not to mention the nine that Manchester City’s Joe Corrigan picked up on the way, and give them to Shilts – well, you do the maths.
Shilton didn’t make his first appearance in the World Cup finals until 1982 – as England had failed to qualify for two tournaments running – but he more than made up for his late start. He then played in 17 games in the finals, more than any other Englishman, and kept a clean sheet in ten of them.
Shilts also notched up over 1,000 league games and is the only man to have made more than 100 league appearances for five clubs (Leicester, Nottingham Forest, Stoke, Southampton and Derby). He was first-choice keeper at Leicester from the age of 17 and he was so good they decided to let Gordon Banks move on to make way for him. Later, he too moved to Stoke City for a world record fee for a goalkeeper of, wait for it, £300,000 – it was a lot of money back in those days, honest – before Brian Clough took him to Nottingham Forest. Old Big ’Ead might have got it wrong about that Polish goalkeeper but he got it spot on with Shilton. With him in goal Forest won the league and then the European Cup two years running. Cloughie said Shilton was worth 10 to 15 points a season to Forest, and he was right.
Shilton was the first goalie that I was really aware of. Until then the goalie was just the fat kid you put in goal because he wasn’t much good in any other position. It didn’t matter too much, because if your side was good enough then the opposition wouldn’t get as far as your goalkeeper anyway! Well, I did say I was only eight.
I remember watching Shilton for Forest on Match of the Day and he would make a run-of-the-mill save look as though it was something out of Barnum and Bailey Circus. He’d tip the ball over the bar and the way he landed was fantastic: he’d bounce on one foot, bounce on the other and then flip himself back. It was almost as if he was diving twice – once to make the save and the second dive to regain his balance and position and make it look difficult.
Shilton took goalkeeping to another level. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, there were no specialised goalkeeping coaches. Of course, being in goal was different from playing outfield but it was Shilton who led the way in its becoming a specialist position with its own training routine and work. Before he came along goalkeepers would train by simply taking crosses, stopping shots and booting the ball upfield. Even then you’d still see keepers kick a ball straight out of play. I mean, how can you kick a ball out of your hands towards a pitch 120 yards long by 75 yards wide and still manage not to keep it on the park? Well, they did a lot of that. Shilton moved it all on to another plane. He brought a stringent regime to his training and worked on every aspect of his game.
He was so good he even had a clone – John ‘Budgie’ Burridge. If it’s true all goalkeepers are mad, then Budgie was probably the craziest of the lot. He used to go to bed at night wearing goalkeeping gloves and take a ball with him, just so he could feel it. When England played at home he’d go along with his boots and gloves in a kit-bag, just in case all the selected goalies got injured or were taken ill. He obviously believed in the ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ theory and that, at the last minute, he’d be asked to go in goal to help England in a crisis.
Like Shilton, he played professional football for almost 30 years and, also like him, he worked out and was a training fanatic. Come to think of it, he even looked a bit like him. He wasn’t as good as Shilts, though. I’m not doing him down by saying that, because you don’t earn a living playing football for that length of time unless you’re pretty good at what you’re doing, but he didn’t have Shilton’s class. He did have a career to match Shilton’s in other ways, mind. He played for a record 15 clubs in the English league, and he’s still the oldest man to play in the Premiership after he turned out for Manchester City at the grand old age of 43.
Given that Budgie was around so long, it’s not surprising that our paths crossed. Arsenal were playing Southampton and he was in goal for the Saints. My job was to stand in front of the keeper at free-kicks or corners and just try to get in his way or deflect the ball – anything to annoy him. Nowadays the keepers put their arms up and draw attention to the fact they are being blocked but Budgie had a different technique. He just stamped on me with his massive boot and broke my toe. The pain! I turned round to square up to him and he immediately yelled, ‘Ref! Ref!’ so it looked as though I was the one who’d started the trouble. The instant that he did it, I thought – You fucking twat, but I must admit afterwards I thought – That was smart of him. Now that’s the sort of thing you can’t coach youngsters, is it?
But I digress. Peter Shilton’s England career ended after the World Cup in Italy in 1990. He then became a goalkeeping coach for England for a while. That didn’t last too long, but he did coach David Seaman when he was starting out with the England set-up. Dave ended up with 75 caps – second only to Shilton – but he didn’t think too much of Shilts’s training methods. He’d come back to Arsenal from a session with the England squad and say ‘fucking works too hard’.
What he was saying was that Shilton’s methods might have been all right for Shilton as a player, but they didn’t necessarily work for everyone. Perhaps that’s why it didn’t quite work out for Shilts when he went into management: he wanted everyone to be in his own mirror image and it doesn’t always work out like that. It’s also difficult for a goalkeeper to become a good manager. I can think of Dino Zoff who was a great Italian keeper for years and a decent manager, but no one else springs to mind. It’s simply that they spend their careers in their specialised position so it’s very hard for them to understand the problems of other positions.
There were a number of areas of the goalkeeping art that Shilton brought to a higher level than they’d been before.
To begin with there was agility. Of course there had been mobile keepers before, but no one like Shilton. Remember he was a big guy and you don’t automatically associate big men with agility. That went out of the window with Shilts. There’s a famous photograph of him making a save for England against Scotland at Wembley. How he got near Kenny Dalglish’s shot high to his left through a packed penalty area was a miracle in itself, but in mid-air he realised he wouldn’t be able to reach the ball with his left hand. That would have been that for most goalkeepers, but Shilts twisted his body and somehow reached the ball with his right – his ‘wrong’ hand – and had enough strength in it to push it clear. It was over in the blink of an eye – it actually takes longer to describe than it took in real time.
He was also a master of narrowing angles and making it difficult for the forward to decide where to shoot. That meant any hesitation by the guy trying to score would be fatal – at the level he played at, either Shilton would get him or a defender would.
He also was one of the first goalkeepers to ‘make himself big’ in a one-on-one situation with an attacker. Probably the most famous exponent of this intimidating art in the modern game was Peter Schmeichel of Manchester United. He was even bigger than Shilts and he’d thunder out of his goal like some bozo blond Viking, putting the fear of God into the poor sod he was heading for. Well, Shilton was doing that 25 years earlier; he practically invented it. He reversed the traditional role of a centre-forward accelerating towards a terrified goalkeeper. The way Shilts perfected it, the goalkeeper practically became the attacker and the man with the ball at his feet was on the defensive. You didn’t want 14 stone of prime Leicestershire beef clattering into you if you could help it.
Shilton was also a forerunner in dominating the penalty area. You read a lot about it nowadays, but if ever they show any old footage of him on the box or you see clips of him on the internet you’ll see what I mean. The box was his domain: anyone else seemed to be an intruder. That went for defenders as well as the opposition. You just got out of the way if you had any sense when he decided to come for the ball. There was one exception, but I’ll get to that later.
But his greatest gift to the goalkeeping repertoire, his legacy to all those who followed in his footsteps and those still waiting to put on a pair of gigantic padded gloves, would place him in my Hall of Fame on its own. Simply put, it is this: always blame your defence for the goals you let in.
When a goal was conceded BS (Before Shilton), the keeper would simply turn around and pick it out of the net. Perhaps, just perhaps, he might give a sad shake of the head and his shoulders might sag a little, but that was it. If the goalkeeper was to blame? There was a hand immediately held up in the air to acknowledge the mistake, and perhaps even a ‘sorry’ to his team-mates. Shilts changed all that.
No matter how a goal has been conceded – whether the ball has been smashed into the top corner with unstoppable power or it has trickled pathetically through the keeper’s legs – the reaction now is universal. Goalkeepers the world over immediately pick themselves up off the floor, select the nearest defender, take a step or two towards him and point a finger vigorously at him. This is always accompanied by a mouthful of abuse aimed at the man he’s selected. The keeper makes sure that the crowd inside the stadium and whoever is watching on TV get the point: he wasn’t to blame – it was the other guy, he was the one who was crap.
Oh yeah, and don’t forget the final, very important gesture. The defender might have a go back at the keeper and blame him, but, as the entire defence walks away getting ready to start the game again, the keeper must turn and face the net – and the spectators behind it – shake his head and hold his arms out with his palms upwards. His whole body then sends out the message: what kind of twats am I dealing with here?
If Shilts didn’t invent this manoeuvre, he certainly turned it into a fine art. He was the Godfather of ‘Weren’t My Fault’. He was a legend for most of his long career, so, if he made it clear someone else was to blame, who would question him?
I remember him playing for Derby against the Gunners at Highbury. Someone crossed from the right and he misjudged it, got too far underneath it and the ball ended up in the far corner of the net. There was no wind in Highbury that day, not even the slightest breeze. If Dawn French’s knickers had been hanging on the line they wouldn’t even have twitched, but that didn’t stop Shilts.
For the next five minutes he was at the edge of his area bending down to pick up blades of grass. Then he’d gently throw them in the air above his head, like a golfer before a key shot or a rugby player judging the strength of the wind as he’s about to attempt a conversion. He’d make a half-moon shape with his hand as if to show how strong the wind was and how it was carrying the grass away. All this was with just one thing in mind: that the uninitiated would think it must have been the wind that caught the ball and took it over his head. Me and Steve Bould saw what he was doing, but the other 39,998 must have thought, Poor old Shilts – he didn’t have a chance once the wind caught the ball. What a pro!
He wasn’t quite as professional in one aspect of his private life, though. I was in my mid-teens when I picked up the newspapers one day and found out that Shilts – a married ‘Mr Clean’ – had been discovered in his car one night with a bird who wasn’t his wife. Shilts had met her in a nightclub and gone for a curry with her, and in the small hours of the next morning the two of them were found in his car by the bird’s husband. Shilton drove off in his Daimler, only to hit into a lamp-post which promptly fell on top of his car. When the police arrived he was cut to the face and, more to the point, almost two times above the legal limit for drink-driving. The result? A 15-month driving ban and a £350 fine.
It just so happened that his first game after all this became public was at Highbury against Arsenal. Just to make him feel at home the crowd sang, to the tune of ‘Bread of Heaven’, ‘Peter Shilton, Peter Shilton, Does your missus know you’re here? Does your missus know you’re here?’ And, to round off a perfect week for him, Arsenal won 1–0 and pictures later showed that the ball hadn’t crossed the line. Shilts had, of course, protested, but when your luck’s out…
Even at my early age, I made a few ‘notes to self’ from the events of that week. First of all, if you are going to be alongside another man’s wife in a motor, try not to park under a bright streetlight where he can spot you when he goes for a drive to find out why she ain’t home yet. Second, if your car is involved in an accident, then report it stolen – but make sure you say it was nicked about three hours earlier. Third, and most importantly, if you do get caught, make sure she’s an absolute darling – it’s not worth it otherwise.
It also emerged later that Shilts, like a lot of players I know, liked a flutter. The trouble was that most of the horses he backed are probably still running. He spoke about it publicly, though, and admitted he had a problem – the main one being he was a crap punter – so he faced up to it in the end.
But time catches up with us all. When Shilts played for England in those 1990 World Cup finals, he was the oldest man in the competition at 40 and I think it showed in the end. In the semi-final against West Germany, the one where Gazza cried – for himself – the Germans scored a goal that I’m sure a younger Shilton would have stopped. Andreas Brehme’s free-kick took a terrible deflection off Paul Parker’s arse, the ball ballooned up into the air and seemed to be there a long time before it looped over Shilts and into the net. It looked as though he was wearing lead diving boots compared with the Peter Shilton of five or so years earlier, who’d have done a Wayne Sleep pirouette and tipped it over the bar.
I’m not slagging off one of my all-time heroes, but you don’t want him to be remembered for something like that. Perhaps it’s like being a professional boxer; you’re always the one who is last to know that it’s time to call it a day.
But let’s remember the facts: in between that Polish goal at Wembley in 1973 and the semi-final against the Germans, this man played at the very highest level for 27 years. It is astonishing, a tribute to all the hard work he put in to top up his natural ability. But he knows better than anyone that keepers are best remembered for their mistakes, not all the saves they made. Perhaps only Gordon Banks with THAT save from Pele’s header is the exception to the rule.
The final irony for Shilton, though, is that the incident for which he will be most remembered is another goal that went past him. It’s the one image captured on camera that has been looked at more than any other in his career. True to form, he immediately protested it wasn’t his fault – and this time he was right.
The game in question was the quarter-final of the World Cup in 1986 in Mexico between England and Argentina. There was no score six minutes into the second half when that horrible little Argie Diego Maradona began running at the England defence. His pass was off-target but Steve Hodge, who had intercepted it, sliced the ball up in the air. Maradona’s run had taken him past Hodge into the penalty area – and into the path of the ball. Shilts came out ready to punch it clear but then Maradona, all 5ft 5in of him, got there first and flicked it into the net. It wasn’t via his head, though – as we all know, it was his left hand that got there first.
Shilts and the rest of the England guys immediately appealed for handball, but the Tunisian referee, Ali Bin Nasser, apparently didn’t see a thing and one of the most famous quotes in sport was made by Maradona after his country’s 2–1 victory. He was asked how the goal was scored and he said, ‘A little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God.’
Shilts at least managed to put it in plain English when he said ‘I would have clattered him if I’d been close enough.’ Should have punched his head off. If he’d managed that he wouldn’t just be one of my heroes – every England fan would worship him to this day too!