Finders Keepers

In Mal Peet’s 2003 phantasmagoric coming-of-age novel, Keeper, two days after winning the Wor­ld Cup, ‘the greatest goalkeeper in the history of the world’, El Gato — the Cat — tells a journalist the story of how he, as a 15-yr-old boy, was taught his trade by a mysterious figure on a football pitch in the depths of a South American forest where his father worked as a logger.
In one of Gato’s gruelling, Shaolin-like training sessions, ‘the Keeper’ tells him that the unexpected is the only thing a goalkeeper can depend on. ‘Like the forest, you will come up against teams who can think of only one thing: how to cut you down. Or how to get past you, around you, through you. And all you have to do is stop them… You have something to defend, to protect. It is only a football goal, of course: three pieces of wood and a net.

But this is more than most people have. And if you can protect that, then perhaps other things, more important things, can also be protected.’