The penalty save

Text 1: The Ski Run, by Martin Selby

An original twentieth-century memoir.

There are eleven of them and one of me, and the goal behind me is eight yards wide and eight feet high, which is a great deal of space for one ordinary man to fill. For twenty years I kept goal for the Red Lion on Sunday mornings, on a pitch behind the gasworks that sloped so badly the visiting teams called it the Ski Run. I was never any good. But I was always there.

The game I remember was the cup semi-final in the winter of 1979. It had rained all week and the goalmouth was a brown soup that sucked at your boots and filled your socks. With two minutes left and the score at one each, their centre forward, a huge, bearded plasterer called Dixie, went down in our box as though he had been shot, and the referee, who was short-sighted and also his brother-in-law, pointed to the spot.

I remember the walk back to my line. I remember the silence, which on a Sunday pitch with forty spectators is not much of a silence: a dog barking, a car going past on the ring road, somebody’s child asking loudly if it was time to go home. Dixie placed the ball, wiped his hands on his shorts and looked at me. I looked back. I had read somewhere that you should watch the hips. I watched the hips. They told me nothing.

He ran. He struck it low and hard to my left, and I went the right way, I still do not know why, flinging myself across the mud with my arm outstretched, and the ball hit my fingertips, and my wrist, and the post, and spun away into the bushes.

For a moment nobody moved. Then the forty spectators made a noise like four thousand, and my teammates fell on me in a heap, and I lay at the bottom of it with mud in my mouth and my ears, perfectly happy. We lost the final three weeks later, six nil. Nobody remembers that. I have dined out on the save for forty years.

Explore how Martin Selby uses language and structure to present the penalty save.

Support your ideas by using relevant subject terminology.