Pelé as a goalkeeper

When you’ve famously scored more than a thousand goals and have gone down in history as one of the best players ever (if not in fact the best one), you can hardly be said to have missed your calling. Still, if the pictures below of a seventeen year old Pelé in action as a goalkeeper are anything to go by, it would seem a decent goalkeeper might have been lost in the legendary Brazilian striker. Because that seems like an excellent save he pulls of in the face of two onstorming attackers.

Embed from Getty Images

Talking about Football...

Günter Netzer after his non-selection for Mexico '70:

National coach Helmut Schön is dead to me. I will never put on the national jersey again. The World Cup, I'll watch on a television screen. I will never play for the national team again.

Source: Willems, Benseman tot Beckenbauer, 103

Courtois following in the footsteps of…

When Belgium took the field against Italy during Euro 2016, Thibaut Courtois became the first Belgian to tend goal at a European Championship in sixteen years. He was following in the footsteps of Eric Deflandre. If that name does not ring the same kind of bell, even among goalkeeping aficionados, that the names of legendary Belgian goalies like Jean-Marie Pfaff and Michel Preud’homme do, it might be because Deflandre was in fact a full-back. He was a fine one at that, earning 57 caps at right-back for Belgium and winning the French league three times in a row with Lyon. But his true five minutes of fame came when the Red Devils experienced a night in purgatory as their Euro 2000 dreams turned into a nightmare.

Embed from Getty Images

Courtois will likely be a little more pleased to be putting on the gloves