Simon Mignolet interview: Liverpool goalkeeper has a new mantra - think less, act more
IAN HERBERT
It is the fact that Simon Mignolet has prepared notes for this conversation which reveals the most. He indicated to
Liverpool’s press people that he wanted to talk and, while doing so, keeps going back to “the thing I wanted to say today” in a way that tells this is not just another football interview but a sculpted insight, into how a player’s game can unravel and be put back together again.
He reflects that things fell apart because he was thinking too much about his football, though the irony of him having thought so deeply about how to explain that fact makes you see that introspection can’t be put on and off like a switch. Mignolet will always be deep thinking and we can give thanks for that.
His readiness to speak is unexpected in these buttoned-up days of football platitudes and, though Liverpool stand apart among the top Premier League clubs in their willingness to entertain an interaction between players and people like us, Mignolet could be forgiven for putting up the barricades.
Publicly and brutally, his game has been pulled apart in the past six months, when even members of the fabled goalkeepers’ union have been willing to weigh in. A former custodian of his Liverpool jersey, Bruce Grobbelaar, compared him unfavourably to Dracula in November “because at least Dracula comes out of his coffin every now and then. [Mignolet] seems to stay on his line.”
Everton’s Tim Howard wondered whether Mignolet would ever reclaim the shirt after Brendan Rodgers had quietly taken the 26-year-old aside at Melwood, on 13 December, and told him that Brad Jones – who had played 10 league games in four years – would be starting at Old Trafford the following day. It certainly felt like a brutal moment to withdraw him from the line of fire.
It was fate – rather than the Belgian’s relentlessly positive philosophy about the break from the train-play-train routine doing him good – which brought him back into the fold. Jones had been between the posts for just two games when he sustained a thigh injury against Burnley on Boxing Day, delivering Mignolet his place back.
Then, a few hours after a moment of the same indecision at Turf Moor that had characterised the player’s decline – allowing a back pass to roll out for a corner – Mignolet’s fiancée, Jasmien Claes, made a very acute observation over dinner. “Simon, are you sometimes overthinking stuff?” she asked.
“Those were her words,” Mignolet relates. His family were over for Boxing Day night and, that hardly being the time for an inquisition, his reply was succinct. “I didn’t really give a response at the time…,” he says. “I said: ‘We think about things.’”
