What next? That’s the question I’ve been asked a lot since I announced earlier this year that I would be retiring, and especially since I played my final game for Celtic a couple of weeks ago.
I haven’t taken any coaching badges, which was a deliberate decision. For some people, coaching or managing is the obvious option when they stop playing, but it is not something that has ever been ingrained in me.
I still want to give something back, though. I am not a goalkeeper anymore but I love to talk about the art of goalkeeping, as well as how it has changed so much in my time – and how it keeps on evolving.
I’m going to be doing that quite a lot in the next few weeks while I’m working for the BBC at Euro 2024 and I can’t wait to get started.
‘Giving a goalkeeper’s perspective’
The reason I wanted to get into punditry is to educate people who are interested in goalkeeping, and hopefully I can help people understand the position a bit better.
I’ll be trying my best to do that by giving a goalkeeper’s perspective, which can be very different to that of an outfield player. Sometimes when a goal goes in, the analysis you see on TV is about how the keeper should have done better, or has made a mistake.
That can be the case, of course, and I am not here to protect goalkeepers from criticism, but part of the way I analysed my own performances during my career was to work out exactly why things happened.
There is often a lot more to a goal than might first appear and I want to try to explore and explain that, and all the different variables that can affect the goalkeeper – from the positions they take up and how they work with their defenders, to the movement of the ball and everything else that is happening in front of them.
These are things that might seem simple but they really aren’t – and I am willing to go into that detail.
Sourse: BBC
