Defending Nothing: The Goalkeeper’s House
By Charles Millet
A man’s house is his castle but also his point of greatest vulnerability. In soccer, the goal resembles a house, and is guarded as though it were a castle - but it is, in fact, sheer vulnerability. The goalkeeper has to guard a house whose sole purpose is to render him vulnerable - a house that offers no shelter, no storage, no comfort. He has, in fact, no genuine reason to protect it - other than to prevent his vulnerability from being taken advantage of. (And often, elsewhere in life, that is the only reason we find ourselves protecting something - a home, a lover, a job, a position: not because we value what we are protecting but simply so as not to be scored against. We protect things that do no more for use than make us vulnerable.)
