October 28th 2019

Today I conquered my irrational ‘fear’ of going in goal by almost getting my fingertips to a shot that I had to dive for.

I’ve been playing football onceish a weekish for threeishyears now and the concept of ‘going in goal’ is still so foreign to me. There’s just not a default reaction programmed into my senses to throw myself onto the cold hard floor. It just does not compute. I see a ball flying past me and my reaction is to attempt to kick it even though I am at that point allowed to use my hands.

Through practice I feel like I’ve improved ‘out on pitch’, but with goalkeeping I feel like you either have it or you don’t, and I definitely don’t. I did make one good save with my hands today, but the shot was head height and I could save it without having to throw my body in either direction.

It just seems like it would hurt. I did do it for one shot, but got nowhere near it and tore up my knee. That was the only goal I conceded during my stint between the sticks this evening, but I walked away bleeding from the knee, ruining my clean sheet and my clean sheets.

Until tomorrow, bah dum tssh.

Jacn