Hart plays waiting game with career at crossroads
Goalkeeper’s future at club level is unlikely to be resolved until other moves open up a space for him, writes Sam Wallace
There is no England player with more caps and more experience in the new post-wayne Rooney era than Joe Hart and, come the next World Cup finals in Russia, the goalkeeper will reach a decade as an international with potentially more landmarks along the way.
Two more caps against Scotland on Saturday and France in Paris next Tuesday would leave Hart just one shy of Gordon Banks’s total of 73 and a further three from David Seaman, beyond which he would be the nation’s second-highest capped goalkeeper behind the immovable Peter Shilton. Hart only turned 30 this year and already has 70 caps while Seaman won his 75th and last cap aged 39 in 2002 – yet long as top goalkeepers reign, things can also change quickly.
Hart is in an unusual position with his career: he has a contract but, in reality, no club. He left Torino after a season on loan in Italy with some good and some bad along the way, and there is realistically no way back for him at Manchester City under Pep Guardiola, who has made it quite clear what he thinks of his goalkeepers by signing Ederson Moraes for a record £35million.
It was the right move for Hart to go to Serie A last season and play as No1 rather than festering at City but it is the next club that will truly define his career post-30. There is the potential for movement among the world’s top goalkeepers this summer, a shifting of the giants of the modern game, but it looks like Hart will have to see where the space opens up before his own future takes shape.
He has two years left on a City contract that pays him around £120,000 a week, and makes him unaffordable in Italy. Which is not to say that Italian clubs are falling over themselves to sign him after some errors which prompted Torino chairman Urbano Cairo to qualify his praise for his English goalkeeper. “He is an important goalkeeper,” Cairo said. “We probably didn’t expect so many mistakes from an England international, but he did some good things too.”
There is competition now with England, in particular from Jack Butland, 24, who is fit again after 13 months out with a fractured ankle, and also from the precocious Jordan Pickford, 23, due to play for the under-21s next month in their European championship. Fraser Forster, 29, has had a less impressive season for Southampton, possibly lacking the competition at club level that would ordinarily keep him on his toes, but he also remains an established Premier League No1.
Hart will be aware that in Gareth Southgate he has a manager who knows Butland well from his time at the under-21s and is also not afraid of change, as he has demonstrated with the quiet easing out of senior players including Rooney and Theo Walcott. The bottom line for Hart is that he will have to find somewhere to play next season in the Premier League, just as he quickly reached the conclusion last August that it was critical he left City to get games.
Pickford is a very attractive option for Premier League clubs such as Everton and Arsenal. Ronald Koeman, the Everton manager, had the chance to sign Hart last season but did not take it up and the likelihood is that Pickford will join the club having shown at Sunderland that he is more than capable of being a Premier League goalkeeper. Arsenal, against whom Pickford had a fine game last month, may also feel that the young goalkeeper’s development forces them to move now.
They are also likely to sell Wojciech Szczesny, who is highly sought after in Italy after a fine second season on loan with Roma.
The major question will be whether David De Gea leaves Manchester United for Real Madrid, and if so what kind of replacement is sought. If Sergio Romero is not to be the first choice then United might turn to Butland.
There has been no indication yet that they would attempt to buy Hart from City but then in these long summer months of the transfer window, plans can change and opportunities open up. Equally, Hart will wonder if Liverpool might offer him a chance.
What seems certain is that he faces another summer of waiting to see how the pieces fall. Last summer, what was hard for him to take was the lateness of the decision by Guardiola that he was not to be first choice, and this time he at least has longer to find a good option. There are considerations for him, too, such as whether he is prepared to cut a deal on pay so that he is a first-choice Premier League goalkeeper in a World Cup season.
In the meantime, he should be able to count on Southgate’s loyalty on Saturday, as he did for the previous qualifier against Lithuania in March when Hart captained the team for the second time in his career. Next season he knows he will not be able to take anything for granted, especially if he finds himself watching from the bench.
‘We didn’t expect so many mistakes from an international, but he did some good things too’