Towards the end of last season, Joe Hart settled on something. He wanted to get away. Not just away from Burnley but ideally away from English football too.
Dark clouds had hung over his career for too long. Since being jettisoned from the Manchester City team by Pep Guardiola in the summer of 2016, he had gone from Torino to West Ham United to Burnley and nothing had worked out.
Advertisement
Hart was beyond frustrated. He was exasperated, desperate for a clean slate, a fresh start under blue cloudless skies – if not literally than at least figuratively.
Over the course of a long summer, a few potential escape routes emerged. Porto considered him in their search for an experienced replacement for Iker Casillas. Club Brugge reportedly showed interest, as did their Belgian rivals Anderlecht, where his former City team-mate Vincent Kompany had taken over as player-manager.
Much closer to home, there was interest from Stoke City, who were preparing for the likely departure of Jack Butland, and from newly-promoted Sheffield United, who looked for a back-up plan in case they were unable to sign Dean Henderson on loan from Manchester United for a second season.
One by one, though, those options disappeared. Sheffield United got the Henderson deal done; no club met Butland’s asking price, so Stoke were no longer in the market; Porto turned to the Argentina international Agustin Marchesin; Brugge signed Simon Mignolet from Liverpool; Kompany had the awkward job of calling Hart to say that, unfortunately, Anderlecht could not afford him and were signing a young goalkeeper, Hendrik van Crombrugge, instead.
In theory, the No 1 shirt at Burnley was still up for grabs, particularly with Tom Heaton joining Aston Villa. Hart played a few pre-season matches and was praised for his performances and his attitude by Sean Dyche, but when the Premier League campaign began, Nick Pope got the nod and, even with the European transfer window still open, Hart faced up to the bleak reality that he was now back-up goalkeeper at Burnley.
At Villa Park on Saturday afternoon, Hart, after the usual pre-match routine, will find himself settling down on the Burnley bench as Heaton and Pope take their places at opposite ends of the field. Next week Heaton and Pope will be named in the England squad along with Jordan Pickford, leaving Hart to face another of those bleak international breaks that bring painful reminders of just how far he has fallen since those days when he was a Premier League champion, undisputed No 1 for the national team and frequently cited among the best goalkeepers in the world.
Was he ever really as good as the hype suggested? The question is a legitimate one, but, while those “best in the world” assessments from team-mates looked a little insular in the age of Manuel Neuer and Gianluigi Buffon (with David De Gea, Jan Oblak, Marc-Andre ter Stegen and others emerging), there is no doubt that, at his very best for City and England, Hart was a formidable goalkeeper.
Advertisement
It will be seven years next week since he produced an astounding performance for City in a Champions League group game against Borussia Dortmund. Jurgen Klopp’s team tore through City’s defence with alarming ease, but Hart made save after save. After a game that ended 1-1, Roberto Mancini, who did not have the warmest of working relationships with him, called Hart’s display “incredible”.
Others went further. “Have to say Joe Hart has been incredible,” Wayne Rooney wrote on Twitter. “For me, best keeper in the world.”
Rooney was not the only Hart admirer at Old Trafford. Sir Alex Ferguson described Hart as “easily the best” English goalkeeper in 20 years, rebuking himself for not having signed him from Shrewsbury Town for £100,000 when he had the opportunity. Hart was solid, consistent and could be relied upon to make excellent saves.
He was 25, an old head on young shoulders, and showed no obvious sign of weakness. His temperament, so important for a goalkeeper, was a strength. He always seemed acutely aware that a goalkeeper’s life could change quickly. “It’s nice that people say nice things,” he said, “but in goal, you can be the worst in the world two days later if you’re on TV and something mad happens in the game.
“You’ve got to try and take the rough with the smooth. You’ve got to remain level-headed. If you don’t, it’s a big slap when you do something wrong. You can’t go too far one way or the other or leave yourself vulnerable.”
It is a long time since anyone described Hart as the best goalkeeper in the world. Other than Burnley’s Carabao Cup second-round defeat by Sunderland in August, it is nine months since he played a competitive game.
“It must be tough for Joe,” Shay Given, the Derby County goalkeeping coach, who competed with Hart for the No 1 jersey at City, tells The Athletic. “When you’ve been at Manchester City, winning the Premier League, one of the best keepers around, England’s No 1, and then you’re on the bench at Burnley, that must be difficult to take.
Advertisement
“In that position – and I had it myself at Villa – you’re desperate to play and desperate to show people how good you are. But you train all week and then the weekend comes and you’re not playing.
“Some people might say, ‘Well, you’re still getting paid good money,’ but Joe isn’t like that. He’s driven by wanting to play football. When I went to City, I got put in ahead of him, so Joe went on loan to Birmingham. He didn’t want to sit on the bench. He’s not that kind of guy.”
That is a common observation. One former team-mate says that “some goalkeepers reach a stage in their career when they’re happy to sit on the bench — and Joe is the opposite of that type. That’s a good thing, because it shows that he’s driven, but it probably makes it ten times harder to deal with the situation he’s in.”
Another source suggests that Hart “finds it incredibly difficult to accept what has happened” but that, in his search for answers, he keeps coming back to the summer of 2016. The line “All because of one man’s opinion” crops up a lot when you speak to people around Hart. In his mind, it has become a career of two halves: before Guardiola and after Guardiola.
Looking at Opta’s data, you would be hard pushed to suggest that rejection by Guardiola sent Hart into a slump. The slump was already well advanced.
Ready for this? Hart’s percentage of shots saved in his first three full Premier League seasons (from 2009-10, on loan to Birmingham, to City’s title-winning campaign in 2011-12): 74.7 per cent, 76.4 per cent (the highest in the league), 77 per cent. Errors leading to goals in each of those three campaigns: zero, zero, one.
Hart’s percentage of shots saved over his next four Premier League campaigns at City, leading up to Guardiola’s arrival in the summer of 2016: 69.6%, 70%, 71.9%, 66.4%. Errors leading to goals in each of those seasons: five, four, three, one.
The statistics never tell the whole story – particularly when measuring something subjective like errors – but in Hart’s case they confirm that the difficulties started long before Guardiola’s arrival.
So dependable in the 2011-12 title-winning campaign, he made a number of strange errors the following season: beaten down to his left-hand side by Adam Johnson’s long shot at Sunderland; a fumble at Southampton that allowed Steven Davis to score; an Andy Carroll shot that squirmed through his hands at home to West Ham; a misjudged cross for Poland’s equaliser against England in Warsaw.
Advertisement
His reputation at the time was such that they felt like lapses, rather than the start of something, but gradually the phrase “uncharacteristic error from Joe Hart” became a running joke on social media. Hart struggled to adapt to new demands under Manuel Pellegrini, who wanted City to defend higher up on the pitch and to defend zonally at set-pieces.
It required a more proactive approach from a goalkeeper, a message hammered home every day in training by the goalkeeping coach Xabier Mancisidor, who arrived with Pellegrini. Hart had always been a certain type of goalkeeper – a shot-stopper with a certain booming presence when defending his own penalty area. Under Pellegrini and Mancisidor, the emphasis was on a more proactive, cerebral approach.
After costly errors in defeats away to Cardiff (coming for a corner) and Chelsea (mistiming a rush from goal), Hart was dropped. Although he won his place back, his form became a regular talking point in the media, particularly in international weeks. Had Ben Foster or Butland made a more compelling case around that time, he might have lost his England place.
By all accounts, Hart detested and resented the scrutiny. Such an obliging, courteous interviewee in his early days, he came to loathe media engagements — and that certainly came across on international duty, where his press conferences became awkward, strained cross-examinations about his form.
Roy Keane suggested as early as 2012 that Hart looked as if he had become “cocky”. At Euro 2016, Ian Herbert wrote in The Independent of the “extraneous preening” and “unpleasant strutting” which, he said, brought a sense of hubris to the goalkeeper’s errors against Wales and Iceland. That word hubris crops up a lot in discussions of Hart’s fall from grace.
Rejection by Guardiola, when it inevitably came, was a hammer-blow to Hart, but, much like those shots from Gareth Bale and Iceland’s Kolbeinn Sigthorsson that beat him down to his left-hand side at Euro 2016, he must surely have seen it coming.
On the eve of the 2016-17 season, a group of newspaper journalists squeezed into a small room at the Etihad Campus for what was to be Guardiola’s first official pre-match press briefing in England. He was known to be looking to sign either Marc-Andre ter Stegen and Claudio Bravo from Barcelona, two goalkeepers who were far more adept withe ball at their feet, and Hart’s future was clearly in doubt.
Advertisement
“Joe is a goalkeeper,” the new City manager said. “And with a goalkeeper, I talk to him and say, ‘Here is the ball at your feet’, rather than what he has to do with his hands. Maybe there are other goalkeepers with more quality at that, but Joe, with training, he can do it – with time. But his time is now.”
In fact, his time had already gone. Guardiola dropped Hart for City’s opening Premier League game against Sunderland, preferring Willy Caballero on account of his “build-up play and personality”, and then Bravo arrived from Barcelona the next day. Hart played against Steaua Bucharest in a Champions League qualifier the following week in the knowledge that his City career was over.
“That was tough for Joe because he hadn’t really done anything wrong,” Given says. “It wasn’t a massive slight on him or anything like that. It was just that Guardiola, with the way he likes to play, wanted the best goalkeeper in the world at playing out from the back – and he has got that now in Ederson.”
In his final Premier League campaign as City’s goalkeeper, Hart made 721 passes, of which just 52.6 per cent found a team-mate. Bravo’s figure the next season was 84.3 per cent. Ederson’s figures, in his first two full seasons in the job, were 85.3% and 82.6%. Hart recorded figures of 44.3% and 45% at West Ham and Burnley respectively.
It is not, of course, a like-for-like comparison. Guardiola’s playing style is extreme. Even under Pellegrini at City, there was nothing like the same emphasis on building up from the back, so Hart frequently looked long, as most goalkeepers do. (Pass completion rates for selected goalkeepers in the Premier League last season: Alisson 80.3%, De Gea 60%, Jordan Pickford 55.7%, Lukasz Fabianski 49.7%, Hart 45%, Neil Etheridge 32.3%.)
“Joe Hart has a certain level of technical ability with his feet,” David Preece, the former Aberdeen goalkeeper, now goalkeeping coach at Swedish club Ostersunds, tells The Athletic. “He’s not an Ederson or an Alisson, but I can’t remember him having a particular problem in that regard when he was at City. People would have said he had good distribution, but at that time, even though it’s only four or five years ago, that probably just meant he was reliable in kicking the ball a good distance.”
Given says: “A goalkeeper’s job has definitely changed, but Joe is capable of playing out from the back. I wouldn’t expect him to do that at Burnley because it’s not the way they play, but if your team is set up that way, with lots of options to look for, he can do it, for sure. I’m not saying he would do it like Ederson does it, because Ederson is the best in the world at it, but Joe can play that way.”
Preece agrees, but goes further. “I don’t think it’s right to say that he’s not good with his feet,” he says. “That might be the reason why Pep didn’t fancy him, but it’s not the reason it hasn’t worked out at Torino or West Ham or Burnley.”
It is not just the fact of his culling by Guardiola that rankles with Hart. It is the timing. By the time he was told he was surplus to requirements in mid-August 2016, the summer transfer window was almost over. Crystal Palace, Everton, Middlesbrough and Southampton had already filled senior goalkeeping vacancies. “I’m not going to lie. I wasn’t sat there with 25 options,” he said after joining Torino on a season-long loan.
Advertisement
Hart embraced the experience in Turin, enjoying the Italian lifestyle and learning the language, but on the pitch it was a struggle. In 36 Serie A appearances he conceded 62 goals. There was sympathy for his position, playing behind an ever-changing and highly unconvincing defence, but his save percentage dropped even further to 62.9. Torino did consider trying to sign him on a permanent basis, but the cost of the deal — transfer fee plus wages — made it impossible.
West Ham? Another false dawn. After 11 games, they had the worst defensive record in the Premier League and Slaven Bilic lost his job as manager. David Moyes arrived as an interim and, three matches later, decided a change of goalkeeper was needed.
In an interview with The Times last year, Hart said that at West Ham he “never felt settled, never really like people understood what I could bring. The fans didn’t really take to me. I felt I was perceived as a wealthy guy coming from City who just needs to do something.”
Hart briefly reclaimed a place in the team towards the end of that season, but then fell out of favour again for its final four matches. When Gareth Southgate left him out of England’s World Cup squad, it emerged that Hart blamed Moyes for denying him the opportunity to stake a claim in those final few games. Based on form, though, he could have no complaints. His save percentage that season was just 57.1, the lowest in the Premier League. In 19 appearances, Opta counted four errors leading to goals.
The move to Burnley was a gamble based on his belief that, with a run of games and a chance to prove himself, he would keep his place once Heaton and Pope recovered from injury. He started well enough, with man-of-the-match performances against Manchester United and Cardiff, but as the season went on, with Burnley shipping goals at an alarming rate, Dyche turned to Heaton, who brought a sense of familiarity and assurance as well as shot-stopping quality.
“I thought Burnley would be perfect for Joe because of the way they defend their box, which really simplifies a goalkeeper’s role,” Preece says. “It’s all about dealing with shots and crosses. The distribution is simplified too.
“But crosses were coming in and, while he wasn’t coming for them, he wasn’t quite staying on his line either – and if you get caught between the two, you’ve got no chance. There was a goal that [Manchester United’s Romelu] Lukaku scored against him where he got caught like that. His decision-making has looked a bit off at times.”
Advertisement
That much-discussed weakness to his left-hand side? “I’ve looked back at goals he’s conceded and I do think there’s a flaw there,” Preece says. “His footwork to his left isn’t as good. With the angle that he dives at, to his left, he’s often square-on to the goal, lateral. If you’re standing on your line and diving from the centre of the goal, then even if you get a touch on a shot, you might find it hard to keep out. Ideally, you’d dive forward slightly. That comes down to footwork.
“But there are other little things, with his handling or with the ball at his feet, where he just doesn’t look as confident as he used to. He comes across as a confident guy. But is he? I don’t know. But I do know it’s a lot easier to be confident as a goalkeeper when you’re in the ascendancy, when everything is going well. Once that bubble has has pricked, that’s when the real tests come.”
Is it too late for Hart? “I don’t think it is,” Given says. “He’s only 32. That’s not old for a goalkeeper. I didn’t join City until I was 32. Knowing what I know about Joe, he’ll be working hard every day and you know how quickly things can change in football.
“People will say it has been a big fall for him, but he’s still got so much going for him as a goalkeeper. He’s just got to keep his head down, keep working, as I know he will, and things will change, whether that’s at Burnley or somewhere else.”
Preece is more circumspect. “Of course he’s a good goalkeeper, but there were always certain flaws in his game and, over the past few years in particular, those flaws have been exposed more and more,” he says.
“It’s about how he sees the next five or six years of his career. People say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but of course you can. And he’s only 32. He can still improve if he’s in the right environment and he feels good about himself.
“Within Joe Hart, there is still a good goalkeeper. I’m certain of that. But it’s about putting it all back together. I think the right goalkeeping coach would want to break his game down and help him build it up again. I do think that’s what’s needed. It doesn’t matter how good you are. Sometimes you can fall into bad habits as a goalkeeper and you need to back to basics and put it back together again.”
Advertisement
Speak to anyone close to Hart and they will tell you that he is willing to do whatever it takes to get his career back on track. He showed that by leaving his comfort zone to join Torino and he was more than prepared to leave the Premier League behind this summer.
It is a long, long way back, though — not just to the prominence he enjoyed in those early years with City and England but even, right now, to the kind of platform he had 12 months ago, when, feeling wanted and appreciated again at Burnley, he finally felt free: “not looking over my shoulder any more, not worried about where I’m going to go.”
A year on, that sense of uncertainty is greater than ever. The easy option for Hart would be to swallow his pride and settle into life as a No 2, but he has never been the type to do that. Anything— anything— but that.
That is to his credit, but, as he continues to grapple with the situation, it is also to his detriment. Stopping things once came so naturally to him. Stopping a downward spiral, when you are out of favour and down on your luck, is the hardest thing for any goalkeeper to do.
(Photo: Matthew Ashton – AMA/Getty Images)
