PETER SHILTON
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
ENGLAND’s mostcapped footballer sits in a quiet corner of a hotel in Essex and ponders a question about why the experience gathered during 125 appearances is no longer called upon.
Peter shilton is 70 on Wednesday week but does not look it. That compact, squat frame still looks in good order, his black hair flecked only a little now with grey.
He played his football in four different decades, won the First Division and the European Cup and represented England in three World Cups. He has not exactly been lost to our game but neither — since he retired on the other side of 1,000 matches — has he really been central to it.
Recently he put together a video of goalkeeping techniques that were fundamental to a playing career that didn’t end until he was 47. He has called it ‘ shilton’s secrets’ and isn’t sure what to do with it. If there are no takers, he may just put it on the internet.
‘I am older now so obviously don’t want to be out there every day whacking balls on a training pitch,’ shilton said. ‘But I was saying to my wife steph the other day that I don’t want the techniques I have built up over 30 years to be lost.
‘A lot of the exercises the coaches use now are the ones that I developed. But I am not sure they understand the actual techniques.
‘I made the film two years ago and I wouldn’t mind a bit of consultancy, using the film to explain a tip or two.
‘A lot of people don’t really understand goalkeeping at all. I watch a keeper and know what he is doing or should have done. You don’t get anyone explaining that on TV do you?
‘All the modern keepers are very fit and make great saves but it’s the ones they let in that I look at. I think that with right techniques they could improve by 15 or 20 per cent.’
shilton wasn’t coached thoroughly at all until he played for Bobby Robson’s England in the early 1980s. The gloves he wore in his early days at Leicester and stoke were made of string and bought from a garden centre. The black ones he wore when he made a famous save at Wembley from scotland’s Kenny Dalglish in 1973 he had designed himself.
But shilton was always talented and always worked desperately hard. His rival and friend Ray Clemence — with whom he vied for the England spot for a decade — used to call him ‘the perfectionist’ and shilton does not mind that. ‘It was funny,’ shilton told Sportsmail. ‘People said Ray was the natural. He didn’t train that much. He would face a shot and shout “wide” instead of diving.
‘But then Clem got the England coaching job and I was on the side of the pitch for sky when he was working with Paul Robinson. He was doing all my exercises! I shouted to him and he admitted it.
‘But we were good friends. We still have a laugh and a giggle. We roomed together for 10 years with England and never once spoke about football.
‘We were different goalkeepers but I like to think we could play. As Brian Clough once said: “You can train all you like but you have to have a bit of talent, son”. I think I had some.’
sHILTON’s hero was Gordon Banks. As a kid growing up in Leicester, he was invited to come and watch the great man train at Filbert street.
‘Most of the time I was just fetching the balls,’ he recalled. ‘Gordon thanked me. Little did he know I was going to join the club. I joined at 15 and at the age of 16 made my first-team debut.
‘Gordon was away with England. They didn’t suspend the league games back then. I was still an apprentice so I did jobs at the ground, put the kit out, swept up and then went home for a sleep and a bit of tea.
‘Then I played against Everton that night in front of a full house. We won 3-0 and I had a solid game. The next morning at 7.30am I was back there cleaning boots.’
shilton had a storied career and will always be remembered for the league title and two European Cups he won with Clough’s Nottingham Forest.
But he is a Leicester lad and a Leicester fan. From the age of six he wanted to play for his hometown club and when Leicester eventually had to choose between him and Banks, it was the England star who was stunned to have to make way.
‘Arsenal and Manchester United were keen on me and I think stoke and West Ham saw that situation and came in for Gordon,’ said shilton.
‘He was sold to stoke and yeah he was a little bit surprised. But he came up to me after and said, “I have done quite well out of this”. That was the only way you
ever got any money back then, by leaving.’
Coincidentally, after eight years at Leicester, Shilton followed Banks to Stoke. The fee of £325,000 in 1974 was a world record for a goalkeeper. Stoke were challenging at the top that season but when a storm blew the roof off the Main Stand at the Victoria Ground, players had to be sold to fund repairs. Shilton stayed but Stoke were relegated in 1977 and it wasn’t long before he was cementing a relationship with Clough that had its roots in a meeting between the two men a year earlier.
‘When I was at Stoke, I was feeling down as I was out of the England team and we had sold our best players,’ Shilton revealed. ‘I phoned Brian Clough up and asked if I could come over and have a chat. I knew he had tried to sign me when he was at Derby and at Leeds.
‘I didn’t know him but he invited me over for a meal at a hotel behind Trent Bridge. We chatted away and had a lot in common. He made me feel a lot better. He signed me a year later.’
As Forest won the First Division in Shilton’s first season, he conceded only 18 goals in the 37 league games he played. That year he won the PFA Player of the Year Award, the most recent goalkeeper to do so. Subsequently, he was part of the Clough team that stunned Europe.
‘I actually thought I had a better season the year Stoke were relegated but what happened at Forest was like a miracle,’ he said. ‘I could actually have ended up at Man United from Stoke instead. Jimmy Greenhoff phoned me up and said Tommy Docherty had agreed terms with Stoke for me. Two days later Tommy got the sack. So maybe it was fate that I went to Forest.’
Clough’s Forest team have been lionised in books and in film. Shilton says he finds it hard to say which was the better achievement, Forest’s or Leicester’s in winning the Premier League in 2016.
‘Both sides had incredible team spirit and never-say-die attitude,’ he said.
It feels a little like diplomacy and it’s hard to blame him.
As for his relationship with Clough, it was as personal and contradictory as we have come to expect.
‘I used to strip right by the door next to the shower,’ Shilton smiled. ‘My kit and boots would be laid out at 2pm on a Saturday and I would be focused on the game. That was me. All about the preparation.
‘But Brian would have played squash — rugby top, shorts and scruffy trainers — and he would come in, push all my stuff out of the way and time it perfectly for his shower.
‘He would be towelling himself down and there would be a big puddle of water where I needed to stand.
‘He was like, “Hang on Pete, won’t be a sec” and then would barge past me as he walked off saying, “Hope you didn’t mind that”.
‘All the lads would be sniggering as I mopped up the water. They knew I would be irritated. But I would just have a little mumble.
‘But it did me good. It kept me on my toes. He wanted to make sure I didn’t get above myself. It was called management and how can any of us look back and say it was wrong?’ THE England team that travelled to Spain for the 1982 World Cup was the best Shilton feels he played in. Had Kevin Keegan and Trevor Brooking not been injured, he believes they may have won it.
As it is, Ron Greenwood’s side went out at what, back then, was a second group stage. Inevitably, though, Shilton remains forever associated with one of the World Cup’s most infamous moments, the Argentina forward Diego Maradona leaping with him to punch the ball into the goal during a quarter-final in Mexico four years later. Argentina won the game 2-1 and went on to win the World Cup.
‘I don’t like to be associated with it,’ Shilton shrugged. ‘It was so blatant. He had first run so I had to lunge at it. But I was always getting there first.
‘I made a good decision to come from my line but couldn’t get close enough to jump into him as I normally would have. He knew that so he punched it in.
‘You are in a World Cup quarterfinal and are looking at the officials. Everybody saw it apart from them.
‘People say he scored a great second goal after that but we were still not concentrating properly when he scored that one.’
Periodically, there is talk of the two men meeting but Shilton has never been interested unless guaranteed that there was an apology incoming.
‘Some of the things he has said since and the fact he hasn’t apologised is not right,’ he added.
‘His attitude is what a few of the lads don’t like. Gary Lineker says he isn’t bothered but me and Peter Reid and Terry Butcher and others are and we wouldn’t shake his hand. No chance.
‘After all I achieved this has become a focal point and I don’t like that.
‘Had he wanted to meet and apologise I would have done it but he has turned that down.’
Next year will mark 50 years since Shilton made his England debut, against East Germany. His record of 10 clean sheets at the World Cup finals is matched only by Fabian Barthez of France.
‘I would have that record on my own had it not been for Diego,’ he said.
England lost the 1990 semi-final on penalties to Germany — ‘ they were brilliant penalties’ says Shilton — and he retired from the international game after that tournament.
His club career continued until the age of 47. By his own admission he was ‘ desperate’ to reach 1,000 games and finally did so playing for Leyton Orient against Brighton in November 1996.
A spell in management with Plymouth had actually preceded that milestone and it was not to be repeated.
He said: ‘I expressed interest in the job at Blackpool and they just asked me to send my c.v. That was a bit, well, you know...’
These days he is settled near Colchester with his second wife Steph. On Twitter, he is noticeably pro-Brexit.
‘It’s only an honest view,’ he said. ‘I am a Brit at heart. I loved the England Women at the World Cup and I am backing the cricketers at the moment.
‘I have always followed politics. You have to have a view and I am not ashamed of mine. You do get idiots on Twitter but I have a thick skin.
‘Being a goalkeeper you are used to it. I used to get much worse from behind the goal all the time.’