Goalkeepers have traditionally held a settled place in football lore. Before being reinvented as a preening, well-groomed extrovert, the goalkeeper was a damp, glowering figure, the sport’s own poetically doomed outsider. Albert Camus was a goalkeeper. Wim Wenders made The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, a terse film about a goalkeeper who is also an existentialist loner. In Gianluigi Buffon’s early days in the mid-1990s, he would trawl the garages of Parma scavenging scraps of rubber to strap to his body as protection. By the time he retired aged forty-five and one of the greats, he was a glossy celebrity athlete, a little wild-eyed and gangly, but with the look of a charismatic Las Vegas stage magician.

Saved is a lot more than just a memoir of Buffon’s playing days. It’s a brilliant book, hammy and overblown at times, but always enthusiastically poetic. Buffon explains that goalkeeping is pain, beauty, transcendence and love. The book opens with a short description of his realisation at half-time that he was