Everton goalkeeper Jordan Pickford is one of a kind
Everton goalkeeper Jordan Pickford is one of a kind
If Tottenham Hotspur want Jordan Pickford, they’d better be prepared for glorious chaos
The idea that the BBC is politically impartial is laughable. It only takes one look at the people in charge of politics, news and, well, everything else at the BBC, to see that.
The thin-skinned free speech advocates of Twitter predictably pissed their pants about Gary Lineker using his voice to speak up for vulnerable people and the fall-out of his suspension from Match of the Day has been quite spectacular to watch.
The corporation’s sporting talent effectively went on strike in support of the presenter, leaving MOTD crippled, Final Score and Football Focus on the scrapheap and the government hoping desperately that their latest vacuous culture war sortie, while clearly a vote loser, will at least work towards their ideological aim of killing the damned thing.
Whether corrupt or callow, the willingness of the BBC to acquiesce to the demands of a hostile, seedy, sleazy, slimy government will have done little to embolden support. I, for one, care just a little less this week than I did last.
Jordan Pickford is one of a kind
Picture in your mind a street caricaturist’s impression of Everton and England goalkeeper Jordan Pickford. What do you see? Little arms, wild eyes and a big, yapping mouth? The slicked-back hair of the coolest ten-year-old in the class?
What about an iron fist forever frozen in time? Or a bionic left leg, striking through the ball with the fury of a thousand robot gods?
Pickford is often spoken about with the kind of contempt usually reserved for those who make a living doing something truly despicable, like contract murder or advertising.
But I’ve long been something of an admirer. Not the kind of admirer who sees only positives and perfection; more a rubbernecker who’s able to enjoy the balls-ups and brainfarts but also respect his ability as a footballer.
Pickford isn’t Pickford without the mania. It’s easy to laugh at players who are passionate and vocal but not up to scratch – Kevin Clancy is probably still wiping Joe Hart’s spittle off the end of his nose – and English football is now more enlightened in terms of flowery notions like technique and tactics and training with a ball, but it’s still necessary and indeed powerful to, you know, care.
Somewhere in the tangle of quality and quirkiness, somewhere between the extreme perceptions, can be found the real Jordan Pickford. Good, bad, weird, mad – it’s all stuff that makes him what he is.
Pickford joined Everton from Sunderland in 2017 and made his England debut in the same year. In the five-and-a-bit years since, there seems to have developed a divergence in his reputation. There is an Everton Pickford and an England Pickford and they meet only in the over-zealous opinions of people who think the former should disqualify the latter from existing.
The exaggerated Everton Pickford in the mind’s eye of the public is generally competent but prone to high-profile mistakes, the kind of moment that warrants a comment in passing but gets lapped up by the mouth-breathing football shell beings of the internet. He’s a liability in spotlight moments, it seems, though I’m never quite sure how true that actually is.
There’s also some evidence of recklessness. His infamous challenge on Virgil van Dijk in the Merseyside derby in October 2020 left the Liverpool defender injured and sparked a layered debate about VAR.
Reds supporters disagree but to my mind the incident was a case of Pickford not thinking. There was no malice, only a primal need to deny. Professional footballers are supposed to have a killswitch to abort challenges like that; I’m not certain Pickford’s is fully functional.
In fact, if I were to commit to any opinion of Pickford with any degree of certainty it would be that he isn’t as funny, as loopy, as tightly wound or as calamitous as his outsized reputation for carnage and error would have us believe. I think he’s rather closer to England Pickford than that.
Pickford has been Gareth Southgate’s undisputed number one goalkeeper for some time. He has a half-century of caps at the age of 29, which is a very decent return for a goalkeeper, and between player and gaffer the clamour for Nick Pope, Aaron Ramsdale, Dean Henderson, Sam Johnstone, Jack Butland and others has been robustly rebuffed.
The Everton man is also England’s man whether we like it or not, and, honestly, I’m very comfortable with it. His international career has been imperfect but I struggle to recall the kind of serious errors that supposedly define his club game.
Instead, his much discussed tactical benefit dominates my thinking along with something about his contribution that I think is too often overlooked. Pickford has produced some huge moments for England where his competition have none. Opportunity plays a part, for sure, but that shouldn’t take away from Pickford’s achievements in an England shirt.
He also has on his CV something very, very few England internationals can claim. Geoff Hurst, Bobby Moore and Gordon Banks have one. Gary Lineker and David Platt have one. Paul Gascoigne has one, for better or worse. David Beckham and arguably Kieran Trippier have one too. Pickford’s is undeniable: a truly iconic image, the biggest of big moments. The kind of history about which his understudies can only dream.
England’s run to the semi-final of FIFA World Cup 2018, where both Pickford’s and Trippier’s legendary images were built, is always going to be underestimated. That they might have encountered a tougher set of fixtures is clearly true, but this is England. There is no “easy side of the draw” for England, only hurdles they’ve fallen at before and will fall at again.
Thus, winning a penalty shoot-out at the World Cup for the very first time was a big deal. Pickford saved Carlos Bacca’s penalty in some style. As the Everton goalkeeper dived right, Bacca struck his spot kick – Colombia’s fifth – down the middle. He hit it well, too, meaning that Pickford’s deft but desperate late reach with his left hand had to match it for strength.
The image it created, that unmistakable silhouette, the iron fist, immediately earned its place in history thanks to Eric Dier’s somewhat squeaky winning kick. The ability to pull off a save like that, not to mention the astonishing claw in the 90th minute of the same game to deny Mateus Uribe, was Pickford at his brilliant best.
I wonder whether the lack of such a monolith for his club partly explains the difference in perception.
Might a crucial shoot-out win or a cup final save for the Toffees elevate his legend in Liverpool? Would a famous night in Europe make Pickford famous too? So badly coached and managed have Everton been in Pickford’s time at Goodison Park that we’ll probably never know.
Or is there something lurking in the grey, some ultimate binary judgement of Pickford’s abilities lost in the great unspoken truth that almost none of us really know how to judge one elite goalkeeper against the next? I sure don’t.
My lay person’s analysis of Pickford’s game – albeit one largely twisted by a preference for England – is that he is a stopper of shots, a passer of footballs and a little bit not-quite-right in the way all goalkeepers should be. But I don’t really trust my eyes and instincts on this one.
At the time of writing, Pickford is fourth in the Premier League for PSxG-GA (yes, that’s a real thing and it seeks to measure a goalkeeper’s actual goals conceded versus the average expected goals from the total xG of the shots they’ve faced) and fifth for the per-90-minutes equivalent.
At the same stage of the season three years ago, Pickford’s PSxG-GA was dreadful, by the way. I don’t know what that means either. I do know he’s in the form of his life by that particular metric.
Only Bernd Leno and David Raya (whose numbers are absolutely extraordinary for Brentford this season) have made more saves than Pickford. Yet he’s tenth for save percentage. An Everton goalkeeper’s work is never done, I suppose.
In his time at Everton he’s never made more saves per 90 minutes or had a higher save percentage in the Premier League than this season. Look into his numbers and you might see something very much expected and something perhaps not.
First, the influence of Frank Lampard on Everton’s performance last season is clear. Second, 29-year-old Jordan Pickford is showing signs of growth and improvement in his game, not least in the actual goalkeeping bits.
Before the save against Colombia, Pickford had been questioned, mocked even, by the always delightful Thibaut Courtois when he was unable to prevent Belgium scoring in the final Group Stage fixture.
Pickford’s ‘overhand’ technique was heavily criticised at the time because it arguably uses the wrong hand and minimises the reach of a goalkeeper who already needs a stool to get the Coco Pops out of the cupboard.
Perhaps the push-and-pull of his perception is not between abilities and weaknesses, good and bad, but between technique and instinct.
That Pickford isn’t a technician rings true. He could do things more neatly and by the book. He parries the ball back into danger more often than he should. But not being a technically perfect goalkeeper does not make him a bad one. All the flaws, all the supposed moments of madness, are just part of the gloriously unpredictable melting pot of the man.
Pickford is a marvellous goalkeeper not in spite of the things he doesn’t do well, but because of the unorthodox manner in which he does the other things brilliantly.
It’s entertaining to watch because it engenders a fluid, human, sometimes manic style in a game of automatons. Pickford is a high risk, high reward, high intensity throwback, but it doesn’t limit him.
He’s raw, even now. He always will and always should be. But he’s improving some of his underlying statistics as he enters his peak and is still as likely to produce genius as madness. There should be no doubt that he makes a net-positive contribution to his teams. Maybe he’s better than we think.
“We wanted everyone to have a route in to play football, and we don’t want to miss out on any young talent coming through. For us as role models now it’s really important that we help the next generation.”
England’s Alessia Russo on why the Lionesses have campaigned for girls to have access to football in schools. The European champions immediately understood their role in the future and have stood up to be counted. Bravo.
Salty beef extracts
Bruno Fernandes’ dive is a form of cheating that has stopped being punished in men’s football (i)
‘I lost £138k on Football Index – two years on from its collapse, I’m still fighting for justice’ (i)
Wout Weghorst, the ‘This Is Anfield’ sign and some performative, daft anger from Man Utd fans (Football365)
Why there are no winners after the BBC’s two-footed tackle on Gary Lineker (The Guardian)
Goal of the Week
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