THE TWO POPES!
Burnley goalkeeper took a job at Next after Ipswich ditched him 10 years ago. Now he’s gunning for the Golden Glove
‘It’s escaped me so far but I’d love to play at Wembley’
AFACEBOOK memory popped up on Nick Pope’s phone the other day to remind the Burnley goalkeeper, who tops the Premier League Golden Glove table, just how far he has travelled in 10 extraordinary years.
The message told him he had been working on the summer sales in a branch of Next near Ipswich a decade ago — one of a collection of part-time jobs at the time which also included helping out with his cousin’s milk delivery business at an unearthly hour.
‘Odd bits I could get hold of,’ Pope relates, grinning at the thought of a time when he was getting £25 to play for a team in the Essex and Suffolk Border League and had just bought his first car — a Citroen C2, in Ferrari red. ‘Postman Pat red, more like,’ he recalls. ‘It was 1.1 litre so I could do less damage to myself — that was the thinking.
‘That first burst of freedom when you’ve passed your driving test. All part of the fun!’ Now Pope has staked a very strong claim to be England’s first-choice goalkeeper at next summer’s European Championship, and the hundreds of academy players who will be told this month that they have not made the cut should know that this world he describes can still be theirs, too.
He was one of them at the age of 16 when Ipswich rejected him — dumped back into reality after six years in a hothouse environment.
‘At the time you are devastated,’ he says on a Zoom call from his south Manchester home, the day after his 14th clean sheet of the season at West Ham had taken him ahead of Liverpool’s Alisson in the Premier League Golden Glove rankings. ‘But, however they dressed it up for me, I wasn’t good enough.’
Pope soon became so rapidly immersed in an everyday life of friends, laughs, 150 games in goal for Bury Town reserves, essays for West Suffolk College, jobs and the offer of a place at Nottingham Trent University, that he had all but given up on making a living from football.
‘It was there a little bit in the back of my mind but 90 per cent I was thinking it’s unlikely,’ he says. ‘The ship’s kind of sailed. It’s really rare that people go that route and make their way back into the professional game. I was just looking at other avenues.’
Even when Charlton Athletic scout Phil Chapple had spotted him in 2016, prompting the League One club to ask him in to spend time with goalkeeping coach Lee Turner, it was not a matter of life or death.
‘I went with no fear,’ he says. ‘I’d already committed to another path. If it worked, it worked.’ They signed him.
Cast a glance through the long list of clubs Charlton subsequently sent Pope out on loan to and you imagine that the east London years must have been another form of purgatory. Harrow Borough, Welling United, Cambridge United, Aldershot Town, York City and Bury. Pope played for three clubs in 2013. Yet he sought all of this.
‘I was desperate to get out on loan,’ he says. ‘It was always about trying to prove myself at that level and then a team would take me at the next level. If you do well at Conference South level, you’re not knocking on League One’s door.’
There were a few inauspicious moments — a five-week spell at Aldershot, with the two-hour rush hour commute from home and three goals conceded in three of his five games. Agony at getting under a high ball to hand Accrington a 90th-minute equaliser as York chased a play-off place in April 2014.
But the benefits of that road not taken with Ipswich are overwhelming. Above all, Pope learned how not to fear mistakes and how to maintain equilibrium.
‘You might be playing on a mud bath with three people watching and the ball’s being chucked in the box from the half-way line,’ he says. ‘When every team’s got a long throw, the ball’s coming in your box again and again. And there’s me, a young gangly teenager. Or there’s academy football where it’s pass, pass, sideways, short corners, free-kicks short, no-one’s got a long throw. I found an environment you just don’t have in academy football.
‘Lee Turner at Charlton also used to talk about having a middle line — a central point — about feeling and life. However good things get on and off the pitch, always keep that central calmness and reality.
‘Keep close to that middle line. It’s probably not as bad as you think and not as good as you think. If you live and think that way, the tremors and the roller coasters are smaller, calmer. There are fewer ups and downs, which for a goalkeeper is really useful.’
A fastidious interest in watching other goalkeepers has helped. He was fascinated by the technique of Petr Cech, of a similar height to Pope, in Chelsea’s first Jose Mourinho pomp. Pepe Reina and David Seaman are other influences.
The 28-year-old’s discussion of the Golden Glove award — and whether he might depose Alisson — is notable for the ‘we’, rather than the ‘I’ he employs.
‘Our team are not big hitters and not generally a top-six team,’ says Pope. ‘For us to take home the Golden Glove would be incredible as something for the effort that goes into it from the 10 lads who are running and running like you wouldn’t believe. Like their life depended on it.
‘I’m also well aware that I’ve played more games than Alisson this season, but I don’t think that counts in the Golden Glove table! For him to get the total he’s got in that number of games is a great effort.’ Pope has played 34 league games this season, against Alisson’s 25. There was a time, just before Alisson joined the club two years ago, when reports were circulating of Liverpool’s interest in Pope — who made his first Premier League start in Burnley’s 1-1 draw at Anfield, in September 2017. ‘I was aware of the paper talk,’ he says. ‘I’d have someone sending me a link on WhatsApp every other day! Nothing more came of it. I think they picked a good one in the end anyway!’
Winning the league’s goalkeeping prize would certainly be a statement of intent where dislodging Jordan Pickford as England No 1 is concerned, though Pope is too diplomatic to say so. Next summer’s Euros also still feel like an eternity away, to him.
‘I would love to see how many caps I can get,’ he says. ‘I’m never going to be one who can get 50 or 60, because of my age. But getting as many as I can is a motivator. Another massive ambition of mine is to play at Wembley.
‘At York we lost a play-off semi-final, when Tottenham were there I was injured and my England debut was at Elland Road. It’s something that’s just escaped me so far. I’d love to play there.’