Bruce Grobbelaar was born in South Africa to a father who had kept goal for Rhodesia, in whose National Guard the teenage Bruce would serve during the Bush War of the mid-1970s. Having played for three clubs in his adopted country and then in his native Durban, as well as having been capped by Rhodesia, he arrived in England, via Canada, for a loan-spell at Fourth Division Crewe – which ended, with Bruce scoring from a penalty in his last game, when he returned to Vancouver for their 1980 season in the NASL.

Then came his career-defining move to First Division Liverpool – as deputy to Ray Clemence until the latter left for Tottenham. So Liverpool, the last word in consistency and reliability, now had a goalkeeper who would be liable to alarming gaffes. Yet he became one of Anfield’s best-loved goalkeepers –

an eccentric, confident, agile, flamboyant crowd-pleaser, who played the showman with an acrobatic swagger, bordering on the arrogant.

That apparent circle of contradiction can be squared if one accepts Bob Wilson’s assessment of Grobbelaar in his analysis of “crazy” goalkeepers. Wilson reasons that 98 per cent of Bruce’s goalkeeping was “no different to anyone’s else’s.” But his sheer “range” of ambition within the penalty area made him more error-prone than most, Wilson argues, while there was no harm in his extrovert flourishes effected after he had already saved.

Bruce was certainly consistent enough to help Liverpool win six League titles, three FA Cups, three League Cups and one European Cup. After which, he joined Southampton, where he spent two seasons jostling for the goalkeeping jersey with Dave Beasant. While Beasant may have been the ideal ’keeper for Wimbledon’s “Crazy Gang”, he was less likely than Grobbelaar to play the clown. Bruce had held sway for the first third of the 1994-95 season when the circus came to town on 19 November. The Saints beat Arsenal 1-0 at The Dell, that afternoon, but that was not the story. Earlier in the week, the Sun had accused Bruce of throwing matches for money. Alan Ball selected Bruce for the Arsenal game and the pre-match entertainment came from the terraces: a carnival of banners and banter. Some home fans declared Bruce innocent, while others railed against the Sun. Some of the Arsenal fans waved money. The judicial process was a lot less amusing.

Found Not Guilty after a re-trial, Bruce successfully sued the Sun for libel – although the House of Lords reduced his award, on appeal, from £85,000 to £1, with costs against him in the order of £500,000, which he could not pay. By the time he was declared bankrupt, he had completed a whistle-stop tour of England’s lower divisions and had returned to Africa. He held a number of coaching appointments in South Africa – notably at Supersport, the club founded by Terry Paine – without any great success. In 2007, he returned to England, to play in a fund-raiser for Glasshoughton Welfare. Having moved to Canada, with his new family, in 2009, he covered the 2010 World Cup for a Norwegian TV channel. In 2018 he came out of retirement to play one game in the ConIFA for Matabeleland against the Chagos Islands. He was their goalkeeper coach at the time.