Jens: Key To Great Goalkeeping? Education.

I still haven’t decided whether or not I’m ready for Jens Lehmann to retire. Every time he throws Manuel Almunia under the bus I’d love for the man to get a chronic case of laryngitis or up and decide to retire so he can move in with Olli Kahn as they come out as a couple. Then every few weeks he comes up with an absurd nugget which makes one think it may be alright to keep him around a bit.

Today his topic was goalkeeping in England and particularly why the English variety isn’t so good. The reasoning? Education, obviously.

“Sometimes goalkeepers over here are not going to school long enough,” he told the Daily Mail.

“When you are a goalkeeper you must hold your concentration level very high throughout 90 minutes, sometimes 120, sometimes 150.

“The best way to learn that is at school with academic focus on tasks. When you leave school at 16 you don’t have it, you lose it.

“That’s probably why the foreign goalkeepers are coming over. I know some of them and they are bright people, like Petr Cech and Edwin van der Sar.”

If that’s the case, then who needs intelligence or education? Just get some Focus Factor and English goalkeepers would be devastatingly good.

And does anyone else fear that Jens may choose to become a goalkeeper coach when his career is up? “You’re the second coming of Lev Yashin? I don’t care, go to school”.

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Category: English Premier League