It’s not too late for keeper to show Blues how good he really is
CLAUDIO Bravo has been given the unhappy label since he joined City of being the goalkeeper who never makes a save.
Which is curious in the extreme, because in his two seasons at Barcelona he earned a reputation as the goalkeeper who rarely conceded a goal.
His troubles at City last season need to be put into the context of a player who has won two Spanish league titles and two Copa Americas, as well as being named the best keeper in South America in both 2015 and 2016.
Now he heads into next season with an air of negativity which is proving hard to dispel.
Even at the height of his Willy Caballero moment, when his three saves in the penalty shootout saw Chile into the Confederations Cup final, the snipers could not resist.
They pointed out that his three stops were as many as Bravo had made ‘in the whole of 2017.’
Which is a little scurrilous, given that we are just halfway through ‘the whole of 2017’ and that Bravo has only played nine full City games in those six months.
Some of the abuse has been hysterical, and while there can be no doubt that he had a poor debut season for the Blues, it is tough to see a decent man and an accomplished professional subjected to such vitriol.
Former City keeper Nicky Weaver, now a goalkeeping coach, nailed the reality of Bravo’s situation when he said: “He is not a poor goalkeeper, he’s just had a poor start to life in Manchester.”
He only spent two seasons at the Nou Camp, and yet when he left, he went with good wishes from the fans.
Of course it helps that the first thing he did at Barca was set a new club record by going 754 minutes without conceding a goal, a stunning run which was only broken by a Cristiano Ronaldo penalty.
He went within 18 minutes of breaking his own record in a run of eight clean sheets which straddled the end of the same season and beginning of the next. Cynics might claim that Bravo was playing behind a wonderful Barcelona team, but no other Barca keeper has managed to match his stats. But he was only bought by the club because of his exploits in eight seasons at Real Sociedad, where his legendary status was only sullied by the fact that he took them to court over an unpaid £1.1m bonus. The fact is, Bravo has been a top goalkeeper for several years, and last season fingers were being pointed at him for every goal he conceded, even when he had little chance of making a save. It could be that he has finally hit the slippery patch on his career’s downward slope that only ends one way, and that his heroics in keeping out Portugal’s penalty takers on Wednesday night was a last hurrah. But it could also be, like the 2016 League Cup final heroics were for his pal Caballero, the moment when his fortunes changed for the better.