Why Bravo is Pep’s man

With Claudio Bravo heading for Manchester City, Adam Bate gets the thoughts of his former club and international coach Juanma Lillo as well as Julio Rodriguez, the Chilean’s first goalkeeper coach, to find out why he’s the man for Pep Guardiola. It’s a story 50 years in the making…

On the face of it, Pep Guardiola’s decision to bring in Claudio Bravo to replace Joe Hart isn’t particularly remarkable. The former has won back-to-back La Liga titles with Guardiola’s beloved Barcelona and consecutive Copa America triumphs with his national team Chile. In stark contrast, the latter recently endured a miserable Euro 2016 campaign with England.

However, the motivations that have shaped the reasoning behind Guardiola’s desire to court controversy by axing England’s No 1 are more complex. It’s a tale that takes in three continents, half a century and perhaps even the battle for goalkeeping’s soul. It’s a tale that begins, as so many ideas in football do, with Guardiola’s inspiration, Johan Cruyff.

“I knew nothing about football until I met Cruyff,” Guardiola once said. A midfield playmaker in the Dutchman’s Dream Team at Barcelona, his view of the game was naturally shaped by the experience. He wasn’t alone either. Cruyff’s ideas about space, the distribution of both the ball and the players on the pitch, are widely regarded as having revolutionised football.

What can be trickier to trace are the tentacles of his influence. In respect of goalkeeping, the consequences of totaalvoetbal have certainly been far reaching. When Cruyff pushed for Netherlands coach Rinus Michels to select Jan Jongbloed ahead of the ostensibly superior Jan van Beveren at the 1974 World Cup, it was just an early example of the phenomenon.

Cruyff believed that a goalkeeper’s ability to distribute the ball quickly could be even more significant than his shot stopping. When his own coaching career began at Ajax, Cruyff showed his commitment to this philosophy by promoting Stanley Menzo due to his skill in this area. The goalkeeper coach that he chose to work with Menzo was one Frans Hoek.

Hoek has since gone on to enjoy a distinguished career as a goalkeeper coach with clubs as grand as Barcelona and Manchester United, working regularly with Louis van Gaal. But he is more than a coach. To many, Hoek is a goalkeeping guru – the man who literally wrote the book on how to be a goalkeeper. The Hoek method is rooted in his relationship with Cruyff.

Hoek identified that there are two different types of goalkeeper, the R-type and the A-type. One reacts to situations and the other anticipates them, with all keepers coming in somewhere along this spectrum. Even while acknowledging that reaction goalkeepers “usually receive better comments” Hoek’s own sympathies on the issue remain clear.

Edwin van der Sar credits him as “one of the first guys who connected goalkeepers with defenders and midfielders” and, from Jongbloed to Menzo, Hoek has favoured anticipators – those who could behave like outfield players. At Barca, Vitor Baia was replaced by Ruud Hesp because he was uncomfortable if “forced to become part of the build-up”.

Among those struck by Hoek’s approach to goalkeeping was a coach living and working 12,000 kilometres away in Santiago, Chile. In his day, Julio Rodriguez had been a fine goalkeeper in his own right with a charismatic personality and a penchant for dramatic penalty saves. A resemblance to Lou Ferrigno even saw him nicknamed the Incredible Hulk.

By the mid-1990s he was working as a goalkeeper coach at one of his former clubs, Colo-Colo, and going to considerable lengths to further his education. “I met Frans Hoek in 1996,” Rodriguez tells Sky Sports. “He was working at Ajax with Louis van Gaal and I was working with the youth goalkeepers of Colo-Colo at the time.

“I knew about Frans because he did a series of three videos about goalkeeping. They are still very good, by the way.” Good enough for Rodriguez to travel to the United States to seek out Hoek when he found out Ajax were in the Americas. “I went to Los Angeles to meet him from Chile,” says Rodriguez.

“When I met him in that clinic he told me that if I liked his ideas I had to go to Holland to take my courses, and that is exactly what I did. For him the goalkeepers have to be just like outfield players. They need good technique, great control, to be able to pass the ball with precision, kick the ball like a master, play as a sweeper and, as well as all that, stop shots.”

The ideas …

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