ROBERT SANCHEZ: CLOSER TO GOD
Everything and nothing has been written about Robert Sanchez. If you want 40 articles about how a kid from Cartagena ended up in Sussex at 15 then fill your boots on Google. Want intriguing headlines about Rochdale to La Roja? Go for it. There’s also about 200 of those clickbait ones on The Argus where a mate of a mate of a mate of Andoni Zubizarreta said he liked the guy. Good hands. Good feet. Athletic. Repeat.
It has all been written. The club press office has released him for interviews. It’s quite a story. But we still don’t know much about him. His rise was perhaps unforeseen, and yet here he is. Number one. Comfortable and kind of aloof and magically enigmatic.
His rise is both a compelling narrative in a storytelling sense (snore, see above) but perhaps most importantly to us, as fans, in the physical sense. Because that is the thing with Robert Sanchez. He just jumps. He jumps and he catches the ball. In what world does a keeper in his very early 20s command such status among a fanbase for catching a ball? Well, it’s typical Albion actually.
Since Tony Bloom turned up, we have seen the culture of the club change and there is a style of football, or footballer, we want to see. It’s not arrogant. We’re not proclaiming to have a ‘way’, or outwardly branding ourselves as such, but we’re in the business of creating idols in this period of club history and Sanchez fits the mould perfectly.
It’s simple; take a player with a high-ish level of football competence, sprinkle a little bit of magic in (normally this means being from somewhere far, far from Brighton, be it geographically or socially) and give them some mysterious origin story. Like they’ve arrived on a meteor. Or from the Spanish second division, either will do. The Spanish thing is very important here. Mention Spain or Latin America and it’s like catnip to Albion fans. A few people have shaped this club into what we enjoy today, but first we have to start at King Ferdinand II of Aragon and his wife Isobel I of Castile.
Jokes, not really (well, kind of … maybe that’s one for the BHAHS almanac; Carder, call me), but we can look at Gus Poyet. Poyet bought in Inigo Calderon, we started passing the ball, yada yada yada… you know exactly what happened. If you’re reading this then you probably lived it. We expected flair. Even in League One.
Because it’s flair that really drives us, and anyone who tries to de-flair this club is a heretic. That might be a push, but, well, hi Chris Hughton. One place where we always struggled with flair is between the sticks. David Stockdale was not flair. Casper Ankergren was not flair. Matty Ryan was not flair.
And it’s Matty Ryan that plays such a huge part in the Robert Sanchez story. Yes he was from the other side of the world via Valencia (top marks), yes he had a bit of a globetrotting path to Falmer (top marks), but when it came to that high level of competence? He just wasn’t there.
It was easy to elevate Ryan into something of a cult player. His pitchlength celebratory runs, the fact that he played for Australia … these things were quite cool. The reality though was dour interviews (unless he was getting stroppy about the club), a seeming lack of gamechanging contributions, some mistakes here and there but overall, a feeling of impotence in the area. A feeling of weakness when we were under pressure.
Now, it has been said by football people with numbers/brains etc. that height does not impact your success in claiming crosses. This is not about the two goalkeepers’ respective feet and inches. Ryan just never made you feel ‘chill’ when teams were launching crosses into our box. And that’s the crazy feeling you get when Sanchez plays. Because we’ve not been blessed with goalkeeping talent over the years. You would put maybe Tomasz Kuszczak and Sanchez’s mentor, Ben Roberts as two of the best but the rest are pretty forgettable, sometimes calamitous.
It was against Liverpool at Anfield last season that we saw another way. A contented state where we knew our goalkeeper was bigger, stronger than everyone else. He could do all the rest, the footwork, the shot stopping, the distribution, the organisation, but he could jump. He jumps and he catches the ball.
That is pure magic. A potent tonic for Albion fans. The sight of a 6’6 giant gliding across the pitch and plucking the ball from the air with grace. Normally it’s slow motion because we’re so frightened, now it’s slow motion because it’s balletic.
That’s why he is an icon already. That’s why he is untouchable when he makes the odd weird mistake or you’re a bit concerned that his ice demeanour is perhaps a little more stoner in vibe.
Robert Sanchez is the most exciting goalkeeping talent in the club’s history. When he leaves, and he probably will soon, it’ll be to someone like Barcelona or something stupid. We’ll wave him off like flag-shaggers waving off the Ark Royal down in Pompey, just glad to have seen him play. Reminiscing over a pint about better times, like with Vicente or, erm, Abdul Razak.
“I saw him, yeah” we’ll boast in pubs in 20 years or when he lifts the World Cup with Spain or wins the Champions League. This guy Sanchez. He’s just that little bit closer to god.
This article was original published in Dogma Issue 6, March 2022 and has been slightly amended for publication here.
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