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Rolls and sausage ? Chocolate ? Fiat Punto’s ?
You’d be forgiven for assuming this was going to be about some youtube vlogger having a crisis before they hit thirty however this is, thankfully, not an article about the ‘Hey Guys’ crowd, but rather one about ex Celtic goalie Jonathan Gould, who will be on GIGPOD tomorrow, and talks about the above subjects!
Wim Jansen was a man given a huge task in the summer of 1997 – stop the ten. It didn’t matter how it was done, it just had to be achieved. In August that year, a goalie languishing in the reserves at Bradford City received a call to head up north in his Fiat Punto and be the goalie for Wim in this critical season. A daunting task and speaking to the pod, he goes into more detail about his arrival to Glasgow, twenty years ago.
His Celtic Park debut was not a memorable one, as the hoops crashed to a 2-1 defeat at home to Dunfermline, for our second defeat in a row. The alarm bells were already ringing, the doomsday clock was almost pointing to midnight and shops in the Trongate were being raided and looted. It was nearly the end of the world, restricted solely within the mindsets of Celtic fans, including yours truly.
It would take a strong team to recover from such a setback, and recover we did, with the season finally being kick-started in Perth away to St Johnstone, where Gould made a ridiculously vital save with the score level at 0-0, not long before Henrik’s iconic diving header put us in the lead.
Jonathan went from strength to strength after that match, and after thirty six games, conceded only twenty four goals – a stat that a lot of people tend to forget. The consistent displays from the Englishman, backed up with his solid defence, would lead to the ten being stopped on 9th May 1998, and Jonathan speaks to the pod about his feelings about that season, and that memorable day.
Gould would eventually leave the club in 2003, after playing under four other managers when Jansen left under surreal circumstances after we stopped the ten, and Jonathan goes into how he felt when Wim departed so suddenly in the midst of a triumphant time at the club.
He’s now the goalkeeping coach for West Brom, and talks about his day to day role there working with Ben Foster.
Jonathan came across as a guy with no regrets in his career and no bitterness about how anything panned out, and is very much enjoying his life, and good on him!
Subscribe to GIGPOD and catch it when it's out tomorrow morning!