which I couldn’t speak.” All these quotes, by the way, are from Dudek’s autobiography, which he titled, A Big Pole in Our Goal. That’s the song Liverpool fans sang about him, to the tune of “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” We’ve got a big Pole in our goal.
Before we get to May 25, 2005, I just want to note one more thing. Professional goalkeepers spend a lot of time practicing trying to save penalty kicks. Jerzy Dudek had faced thousands of penalty kicks, and he approached them in precisely the same way: He stood stock-still in the middle of the goal until a moment before the ball was kicked, and then he dove one way or another. Always. Without exception.
The 2004–2005 season saw Liverpool go on a magical run through the Champions League, and by April they were preparing to play the famed Italian club Juventus in the quarterfinals when Pope John Paul II died. Dudek ended up on the bench for that game—he couldn’t think straight after the death of his childhood hero and found himself near tears as he confessed to the team doctor that he couldn’t play that night. Liverpool won the game nonetheless, and eventually made their way to the Champions League final, where they would play another Italian giant, AC Milan.
The final was played in Istanbul, and it began horribly for Dudek and Liverpool. Fifty-one seconds into the game, Milan scored. They scored two more goals just before halftime. Dudek’s wife, Mirella, at home in Poland preparing for their son’s first communion, recalled a “deathly silence” descending over Szczygłowice.
Of the Liverpool locker room at halftime, Dudek wrote, “Everyone was broken.” Liverpool defender Jamie Carragher said, “My dreams had turned to dust.” The players could hear the forty thousand Liverpool fans singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” in the stands above, but they knew it was, as Carragher put it, “in sympathy more than belief.”
The rest I know by heart, because I’ve seen it so many times. Nine minutes after the second half begins, Liverpool’s captain Steven Gerrard scores with a balletic header. Liverpool score again two minutes later, and then again four minutes after that. Now it’s tied 3–3. The match goes into thirty minutes of extra time. Milan pour on the pressure. It is so obvious that they are the better team. Liverpool’s players are exhausted, just hoping to get to a penalty shoot-out.
And then: With ninety seconds left in extra time, Jerzy Dudek makes a double save on two point-blank shots that occur within a second of each other. The save is so good that an entire chapter of A Big Pole in Our Goal is devoted to it. The save is so good that even now, fifteen years later, when I see replays of it, I still think the Milan player is going to score. But instead, Jerzy Dudek makes the save every time, and the game goes to a penalty shoot-out.
* * *
So you’re Jerzy Dudek. You’ve been practicing saving penalties since you were a kid, and you have your way of doing it. You’ve lain awake at night imagining this moment. The Champions League final, down to penalties, you in goal, standing stock-still until the moment before the ball is kicked.
But then, in the moments before the shoot-out begins, Jamie Carragher runs over to you. He jumps on your back and starts shouting. “Carra came up to me like he was crazy,” Dudek remembered. “He grabbed me and said, ‘Jerzy Jerzy Jerzy, remember Bruce Grobbelaar.’”
Carragher was screaming at him: Do the wobbly legs! Move around on the goal line! Just like in 1984! But that was twenty-one years before—with different players, a different coach, and a different opponent. What could that moment possibly have to do with this one?
There are times in your life when you do things precisely as you have practiced and prepared for them. And then there are times when you listen to Jamie Carragher. So in the most important moment of Jerzy Dudek’s professional life, he decided to try something new.
His spaghetti legs didn’t look exactly like Grobbelaar’s had, but he danced on the goal line, his legs wobbling this way and that. “I didn’t recognize my husband,” Mirella Dudek said. “I couldn’t believe he . . . danced so crazily in the goal.”
Liverpool scored all but one of their penalties. For Milan, facing the dancing Dudek, it was a different story. Milan’s first penalty taker missed the goal entirely, and then Dudek saved