Football’s European club matches, which continue next week, have so far tiptoed around in such predictable outline that only the obsessed have been bothered — leaving the headline writers to continue their lather over recriminations about the serious head injury to Chelsea’s goalkeeper Petr Cech, when he dived to save from an onrushing opponent in a mundane Premiership match at Reading. Keen to wade in with my two-penn’orth here, I was about to telephone an old Manchester acquaintance, long retired to Spain, when a bright young sports reporter from the Times saved me the trouble and the money. Nick Szczepanik called Bert Trautmann, who chuckled down the line at the very suggestion that goalkeepers needed more protection, ‘It would totally spoil the English game,’ he said. ‘Helmets? What would happen when a goalkeeper’s helmet injures a forward who was rushing at him? Protection for goalkeepers would make the game topsy-turvy.’
Bert knows about these matters; none better. Topical, too: not only did this autumn mark the 75th anniversary of the death of John Thomson, Celtic’s 22-year-old goal-keeper who died, literally on the spot, when diving at the swinging boot of a Ranger at Ibrox; but this spring saw the precise half-century since Manchester City’s fabled Wembley Cup final of 1956 when Trautmann broke his neck as, intrepidly swallow-diving to cut out a corner, he collided with Birmingham City’s Peter Murphy. Groggily, Bert carried on, made a few more crucial saves, collected his winner’s medal, travelled home gingerly and went to the Royal Infirmary’s outpatients, where they told him he’d broken his neck and should be dead. He was five months, immoveable, in plaster.
There is much more, of course, to Trautmann’s tale.
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