Ben Roberts interviewed in today's Times

Is this about the three points and how he felt in the pandemic when games were called off at will with little to no comeback.
 

Ben Roberts: Conceding so early in the FA Cup final was a real punch in the guts, but I’m well over it now​


Alyson Rudd talks to the former Middlesbrough goalkeeper about the moment his life froze at Wembley​





https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...in-the-guts-but-im-well-over-it-now-tqbj0dshh
When the draw was made for the quarter-finals of the FA Cup, pitting Middlesbrough against Chelsea, the phone of Ben Roberts pinged. The Brighton & Hove Albion goalkeeper coach was between the posts for Middlesbrough when Roberto Di Matteo scored for the west London club after only 42 seconds of the 1997 FA Cup final and his friends in the North East were keen to remind him of the fact.

When that infamous goal went in, Roberts immediately worried about the fact that his mother, Maureen, was in the seats behind him.

“It was as if time froze,” he says. “You hear half the stadium erupt and then there’s the realisation that’s gone in, and then I thought of me mam.

“It knocks the stuffing out of you for it to happen so early in the game, it was a real punch in the guts.”

Roberts has since become one the most highly respected goalkeeper coaches in the country, nurturing, for example, Nick Pope, now at Burnley, and transforming Robert Sánchez from an average performer in League Two to an admired stalwart at Brighton, capped by Spain last September, and a player who Roberts wants to keep under the radar while still learning his craft.

It is tempting to assume that his acumen in coaching stems from having to cope with being the unwanted answer to a pub quiz question, but Roberts shook off the ignominy quickly. Indeed, when Di Matteo’s strike ceased to be the fastest goal in an FA Cup final, after Louis Saha scored after 25 seconds for Everton in 2009, Roberts, although inundated with messages assuming he must be relieved, was unperturbed.
“It didn’t bother me by that point,” he says. “I’d learned to live with it and even during the game I had learned to live with it. I’d rather be grateful for the opportunity to play in an FA Cup final.”


He analyses games constantly in his coaching role and has examined what he did wrong that day. “I was very much a front-foot goalkeeper, playing on the edge, really; I would come outside my box, sweep up,” he explains. “Di Matteo came forward and I was expecting a through ball, and I’d have been on the front foot sweeping it away. Once he shot, I’m far too high. For a 25-yard shot, to be stood six yards out is too high. I should have been two yards high. I don’t catch it, but I flick it over the crossbar so I’m well out of position. Did it make me stronger? I don’t know. No one’s ever changed towards me because of it. Probably perceptions have with Middlesbrough fans at the time, but my team-mates didn’t, my family never did. I’ve let worse goals in than that.”

A few months after, he began to suffer back pain. Two years on, he had an operation that uncovered a blood clot. He had two more back operations by the time he was in goal for Brighton, but no headway was made, and by the age of 29, he had enough of training in pain and missing games and so retired.

“Being a ’keeper is all I remember, diving around, me dad taking shots, me mam commentating in the front room. I liked getting muddy and might have had an excuse as a kid [not to play outfield] because I had asthma so one thing led to another.”

Maureen still commentates. Indeed, when Roberts dropped in to see his mother after Brighton’s recent game at St James’ Park, she dissected the performance. “It was hard work,” he says, laughing. “She talked me through every pundit on Sky TV who’s good, who isn’t good. She didn’t go to Newcastle, but she was telling me about the game, what the pundits were saying, and I was saying, ‘I know, I was at the game.’ She loves Michelle Owen on Sky and called it early that she would be the next big thing.”

Maureen’s favourite goalkeeper is Pope and she has a fondness for Arsenal’s Aaron Ramsdale. “She loves English goalies,” Roberts says.

Surely, a TV or radio network has to devise a way to use Maureen’s debriefs as a regular feature. After his final back operation, Roberts did his rehab in Brazil, where he watched a lot of football, but has “no idea” why Alisson and Ederson are a class apart.

“I used to watch them zinging balls on side volleys to one another in the warm-ups with the ’keeper coaches and I thought, we don’t do that here, but that isn’t what makes them better.”

He went backpacking across South America, learnt how to operate on a tight budget, and then watched England play cricket in India before roaming Asia. “I only came back,” he says, “because I wanted to start my coaching badges and university.”

He won an award for his degree dissertation, which was about whether it is best to jump with or without an arm swing. And yes, he concluded that you do jump higher with an arm swing.

Roberts admits to feeling “a little bit emotional” when Alisson scored a beautiful headed winning goal for Liverpool in May last year and he was “running around the living room,” when Mathew Ryan, a few weeks earlier, while on loan at Arsenal from Brighton, had flicked the ball on at a corner kick.

But he frowns upon ’keepers engaging in banter with supporters. “I wouldn’t tell my goalkeepers to do that,” he says. “I want them concentrating.”
 
I watched an interview with Di Matteo once and he said Roberts had been off his line in an earlier game and they had discussed knocking it over him - it certainly worked. :(
 
I was just sitting down when that went in. I can remember thinking that can't be right and looking at the officials waiting for them to disallow it.,
My son tried to get his autograph outside the riverside after a game but Ben accidently dropped his book in a puddle.
 
I was watching the game in a pub, and they were seeling pints at £1 each from kick off until the forst goal went in. As if the whole thing could not be any worse.:mad:
 
No blame on him IMO. The midfield was wide open. You can have a pop at the lad for being 5yrds off his line but how does Di Matteo stride through the middle of the field unchallenged after 30 or 40 seconds? I’ve always thought it’s too easy to blame Roberts.
 
viv_andersons_nana said:
No blame on him IMO. The midfield was wide open. You can have a pop at the lad for being 5yrds off his line but how does Di Matteo stride through the middle of the field unchallenged after 30 or 40 seconds? I’ve always thought it’s too easy to blame Roberts.
Click to expand...
Emerson was trotting along side him, looked like he was chatting to him😒
 
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