It’s the 27th of Feb, 2016. The Golden State Warriors play The Oklahoma City Thunder in the NBA and the match is tied 118-118 deep in overtime. Steph Curry receives the ball near half court with 5 seconds to go. He dribbles calmly before draining the three-pointer from 38 feet out with 2 seconds left to seal the win for the Warriors. It’s moments like these that seal a player’s greatness; matches that cement the legacy of a player as an all time great.
For David De Gea, it was this match versus Tottenham Hotspur. This match brought huge confidence to United, as they beat Spurs 1-0, and gave them a huge boost for their race for the top four.
People will praise Olé, Pogba will be applauded, but manning the posts, under the spotlight, De Gea has surely secured his place in the history books as one of the all time greats.
It was not just the quality of the saves De Gea pulled off, it was the sheer number of times he was forced to. He faced not a single shot on target in the first half, but faced a whopping eleven in the second.
No other goalkeeper in the world could have dealt with the flurry of shots De Gea faced from the Spurs attack. It was not even that the shots taken were half-hearted long range attempts, but were often intimately close to the goalie.
Dele Alli rose to a header, but De Gea parried it away. Harry Kane nearly toe-poked it past him, yet it was the Manchester man’s toe that forced the ball off the line. Hell, even Tottenham’s centre backs were having a go at him. With one of the best chances of the game, Toby Alderweireld slid a shot to the near post on Christian Eriksen’s delivery but yet again, for the umpteenth time, De Gea forced it off the line.
Even when it was tested from long range, such as from Harry Kane’s searing free-kick, he dealt with it as if he was in training, making an aesthetically pleasing catch, before pulling off a perfect somersault and springing up again, ready to start the counter.
Speaking of counters, you may counter, “De Gea does not even have the qualities to be the unanimously best current goalkeeper in the world, how can he be called an all-time great?”
Well, that’s the thing. De Gea may not be best at distribution, or at manning defences and may not even be the 11th outfield player so many managers want, but what he does, he’s bloody good at. Its not even just flashes of brilliance, but the consistency the man brings to the game is incredible.
According to xG statistics, a figure used to measure how many goals a team should have scored according to the difficulty of chances and location of shot etc, Manchester United should have conceded 35 goals last season. They instead conceded 22, meaning De Gea himself saved his team 13 goals.
No disrespect to them, but I’d like to see how many of the other top goalkeepers in the world such as Jan Oblak, Ter Stegen or Alisson would fare in such a dysfunctional Manchester United defence. At the end of the day, things like distribution may help you smoothen your game and help your outfield players, but the reflexes that De Gea brings to the table win his team matches day in and day out. The only one who even comes close in this department to De Gea is Ter Stegen, yet the German is miles off his Spanish counterpart.
After hitting that game winner vs OKC in late February of 2016, Steph Curry has won 2 Championships and another MVP. If De Gea’s legacy defining moment came versus Spurs, then Manchester United fans better get excited, because there is so, so much more to come.
(The author is a school student who follows football, when he’s not finishing his homework. On a side note, he also answers to the name ‘Pele’ after his mother nicknamed him that for troubling her a bit much from the womb.)
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