Meslier: I was scared at some training in France. Keepers would box. Petkovic took a punch… there was a lot of blood - The Athletic 5/8/21

Phil Hay

There is a photograph of Illan Meslier, taken at Everton last season, in which the goalkeeper appears to be levitating.

He is horizontal and roughly 12 inches off the ground, with his extended left hand hovering over the ball. His bright orange kit finishes off the whole Shaolin Monk look.

Meslier is adept at defying gravity, despite his monumental size.

Last season he was the youngest goalkeeper in Europe’s top five leagues to make more than 10 starts, and the first since the competition’s 1992-93 inaugural year to make 25 in the Premier League before his 21st birthday. He is a rare breed in the goalkeeping fraternity, where old enough sometimes means good enough.

In Europe, in the age stakes, he was closely followed by Gianluigi Donnarumma, the supremely assured Italian who is something of a role model for Meslier.

Donnarumma was a teenage No 1 at AC Milan and, at 22, became a European Championship winner with Italy last month after saving two England penalties in the final’s decisive shootout. He is a few weeks into a new life at Paris Saint-Germain and in the midst of their talks with him, the French club took a quiet interest in Meslier too. Both men are making themselves genuine football stars.

When Meslier watches Donnarumma, he sees not only the skill set of an exceptional keeper but the self-confidence that a player at their position cannot thrive without.

Donnarumma’s job with Italy involves marshalling Leonardo Bonucci and Giorgio Chiellini, the Game of Thrones-extras duo who, at a combined 70 years of age, have seen more active service than Donnarumma has had breakfasts. Meslier is in a similar boat at Leeds United: a 21-year-old who, on any given day, is the last line of defence behind a Spain international, a Scotland international or a Germany international. And from time to time, every centre-back needs a bollocking.

“I know about Donnarumma because he started very young at Milan,” Meslier tells The Athletic. “I like the confidence he shows, how relaxed and calm he is. He seems to have a good feeling with guys like Bonucci and Chiellini. I like his mentality.

“On the pitch, everyone is the same. It’s how you have to think. Players don’t say to you, ‘You’re only 21, don’t talk to me’. In football, you are all on a level and Donnarumma is very good at this. He can shout at anyone, at Bonucci, Chiellini or Leonardo Spinazzola, and they need those shouts — left, right, move! They will want those shouts to play well. It creates a good relationship between them.”

Meslier, whether he realises it or not, has the same serene persona he admires in Donnarumma.

We are sitting on the indoor pitch at Leeds’ training ground, 45 minutes before one of Marcelo Bielsa’s many analysis sessions. Rows of seats are set up behind a wall of screens in one corner of the building and the squad traipse in one by one. Meslier arrives earlier than most and is ready to talk. He has not done a sit-down interview since joining Leeds from French second division side Lorient in the summer of 2019 but he is one of the club’s more intriguing players, with a good story to tell and a warm way of telling it.

The most obvious thing about him at first glance is his physique: bone-thin and exceptionally tall. You have images of him being the biggest child in primary school, primed for games of basketball, but he remembers being of modest height until a growth spurt hit him in his teens and he shot up “maybe 10 centimetres in one year”.

Moreover, he was very much an accidental goalkeeper, preferring outfield positions until the youth team he played for in the Brittany town of Merlevenez arrived at a tournament without anyone to play in the nets.

“When you are young, you want to play out on the pitch,” he says. “You want to score the goals. That was me. But in one tournament we went to, we didn’t have a goalkeeper. My coach said to me, ‘Illan, you go in the goal’. I thought, ‘No, not me’, but after that, I stayed there because I was good at it. Our coach, he was also a goalkeeping coach at Lorient, in the academy, and he helped me a lot, to improve and progress.” Meslier was instinctively good. Lorient, 25 minutes away from Merlevenez, looked at him and liked him. He was nine years old when they invited him to train with them.

Meslier is not certain if he was destined to have a career in this role. Football, he reflects, is not just about ability, not when the sport becomes serious. “Talent is good in the beginning but after this, you need to work hard on it,” he says. “If you don’t work hard, you can only have a normal career. I can’t say if I was (a natural keeper). It’s a good question. To be honest, I don’t know.”

What Meslier can say is that he was not prepared for the culture shock of leaving the family home for Lorient’s academy at the age of 14.

Lorient set him up in a boarding school, where he was unhappy. He disliked the environment of the dormitories and some of the other students there. He had his football to keep him occupied but it was not enjoyable enough to compensate. “If you go to play football and it isn’t good with the football, everything is bad,” he says. “School is bad, the dormitories are bad. It was very hard for me, the first year.

“After that one year I said, ‘No more’ and I decided to go home every night so I could be with my parents again. Wake up and take the bus at seven o’clock, get back at nine o’clock in the evening. (But) it kept the right balance in my life.”

When he turned 16, Meslier moved out again to work at Lorient’s main training centre and discovered a completely different world. “Fourteen was too young but 16 was better,” he says. “At 16, you’ve changed and become more confident. You can say, ‘This is my dream and I want to realise it’. I needed to make that choice.”

Meslier tells tales of first-team training at Lorient that have shades of the boot-camp regime created more recently by Bielsa at Leeds. Some of it involved competition trampolines, designed to improve control of the body. After Meslier turned professional, the club’s goalkeeping coach, Anthony Saulnier, would put him and the other keepers, including first-choice Danijel Petkovic, through “seance mentale” — mental sessions. These were physically gruelling, to the point of making the players want to vomit.

Saulnier would also arrange boxing bouts in which the keepers were told to fight each other to harden them up, develop their flexibility and, according to Saulnier, increase their “courage” in one-on-ones. A qualified boxing trainer was drafted in from Nantes and Meslier and his team-mates tried to give no quarter.

“That coach, he was unbelievable, like being in the military,” Meslier says. “I was scared to go to some of the training. Imagine that! When you miss the ball or don’t catch it — five push-ups. All the time. My body was young and it was so tough.

“He did a lot of boxing, a session once a month. We’d box between us. My god, bang! Petkovic took this punch once and there was a lot of blood. And when the training was just cardio… honestly, it was scary. At the end of the season, there was a difference between him and the head coach and he left but even though it was hard, it was good for me too. You have to take the positive qualities from things like that. Now I’m maybe stronger in my head. Maybe it helped me.”

As Lorient worked on him, Meslier’s name spread around the French game.

Within a few months of agreeing a professional deal in 2018, Monaco made a bid for him, reported to be worth close to £10 million. Meslier had yet to play a senior game by then. Having been on Lorient’s books for almost a decade, he did not want to leave without representing his local club first. “That would have been frustrating,” he says. “I wanted my first game to be at Lorient.”

Then, at the very end of the same summer window, Chelsea came calling. Lorient were ready to sell but Meslier considered the offer and bravely said no. “Chelsea agreed with Lorient and then asked me, ‘Are you ready?’ But it was 24 hours before the end of the window,” he says. “I said, ‘No, it’s too late, man! If you’d come one or two weeks earlier then I might have said yes. I can’t sign for you so late’.

“It was a difficult decision. Chelsea are a big club. You would ask me, ‘Why not (go)?’. But there are lots of keepers in Chelsea’s academy, it’s very hard to grow up there and sometimes you sign and you have to go on loan, things like that. It’s better, I think, to work in your club and then sign to be a No 1 at 24, 25. Not at 18 years old.” Chelsea planned to court him again but were hit with a FIFA transfer ban in the summer of 2019 and did not return with another offer.

Meslier felt settled at Lorient and played 28 times in Ligue 2 in the 2018-19 season after displacing the more proven Petkovic, a 23-cap Montenegro international, 12 weeks into the season. Managing the delicacy of moving ahead of Petkovic was a useful experience for the moment at Leeds when he stepped in front of Kiko Casilla, a keeper in his 30s who had come to England from Real Madrid and had plenty of medals to put on the table.

“Petkovic started that season but then it changed,” Meslier says. “(Suddenly) you have no experience at a high level and you are No 1. It was strange but these are the rules of football. Petkovic was a good friend but you want to play. There are no doubts about your feelings or your confidence, even at 18.”

Meslier, by his own admission, made mistakes from time to time but did not feel under threat. But a change of management in the summer of 2019, Christophe Pelissier replacing Mickael Landreau, altered everything again.

Having prepared to start the new season, Pelissier told Meslier out of the blue that he would be reverting to second choice. Lorient were selling Petkovic to fellow French side Angers but intended to sign Paul Nardi from Monaco. Meslier smiles with mild consternation when he thinks about that conversation.

“I didn’t want to be on the bench,” he says. “I wanted to keep progressing. I knew that if I wasn’t playing as No 1, I had to leave. If I want to keep progressing, it’s impossible to stay with Lorient. That was how I thought. I needed another project.”

Leeds and their director of football, Victor Orta, were waiting in the wings.

Meslier was made aware that he would come to England as second choice behind three-time Champions League winner Casilla but, in his words, “I preferred to be behind Kiko than behind the Lorient goalkeeper”. Leeds negotiated a season-long loan deal including an option to sign Meslier permanently for £5 million. That permanent option was exercised last summer, and it already looks like a steal.

Playing in goal for Bielsa is an intricate task. Meslier and Leeds’ other keepers work religiously on their footwork, allowing them to double up as an 11th outfield player when their team are in possession. Bielsa wants his No 1 to pass and pass again, long and short, and to take risks with balls out of his own box. There are going to be errors, inevitably, because the style of play invites them, but Leeds can only truly enforce Bielsa’s tactics with a keeper whose feet are as competent as his hands. “You have to be focused all the time, in all of the game,” Meslier says. “It’s one way where I need to progress.”

Meslier’s break under Bielsa came late in February of last year, at the start of the run-in to Leeds’ long-awaited promotion from the Championship.

When Casilla was banned for eight games by the Football Association for racial abuse of an opponent, Bielsa promoted the French youngster immediately. Bielsa’s opinion of Meslier was so high that in the previous January window he had declined the chance to bring in any cover, despite knowing Casilla would face a long suspension if found guilty. Meslier stepped in and did not look back. Last month, having lost his place convincingly, Casilla left Leeds to join Spain’s Elche on a season-long loan.

There was amusement before Meslier’s league debut away to Hull City when, in the warm-up, he casually backheeled a ball with his hands on his hips as it flew past him. Was he as unruffled as he looked? “No, no,” he laughs. “I was stressed. I missed my first two kicks in that game and I had to tell myself, ‘Relax, man!’. Once we scored it was better and I was focused on a clean sheet.” Leeds, in full flow, won 4-0 at a canter. From there, Meslier stuck fast as a member of the first XI.

Bielsa has never wavered in supporting Meslier, even on the occasions when mistakes crept in, as they did in a 3-0 defeat to Tottenham Hotspur in January. Meslier does not make too many and I tell him that in the moments when they occur, he seems to know how to process them and move on. “I could say I find that easy but really I don’t,” he says. “You just try to switch from a bad moment to a good one. I think about the next ball because people look for your reaction. If you are down, they will see that. You have to tell yourself, ‘It’s nothing, it’s just a mistake’. After that, you might make a fantastic save.”

Does it help that Bielsa has backed him so resolutely, irrespective of the division or the level of opposition?

“It’s good to have a manager who says you are No 1,” Meslier says. “That is my point of view. But I also think that in training, it’s good to have a No 2 who pushes you.

“A No 1 with nothing behind you, or with someone who’s relaxed and lets you keep your place, is not good. I need a coach who says, ‘Yes, you are No 1’ but also people behind me who push me every day.”

This season his understudy will be Kristoffer Klaesson, a new arrival from Norwegian club Valerenga. At 20, Klaesson is another very young prospect.

Meslier agrees that playing regularly in the Premier League at 21 is unusual. His tally of 11 Premier League clean sheets last season set a new record for an under-21 keeper. “It’s incredible, that’s clear,” he says. “But after thinking like that, you want to play. There are a lot of young players in the Premier League, so why not me?”

There is more at stake too, with France’s first choice, Hugo Lloris, due to turn 35 in December. Meslier has already made his debut at under-21 level but, before long, the fight to replace World Cup-winning captain Lloris in the senior side will begin in earnest.

Lloris had words of encouragement for his potential France successor after that defeat against Spurs in January. “He just said he was very happy with how it was going for me,” Meslier says. “A big-up for him, because he’s a very nice person.

“To be called up by France, that could only come from here (from Leeds). I have to be performing for Leeds first and it’s down to me, myself. I don’t know about being No 1 for France… it’s possible.”

So, back to defying gravity.

Find yourself a goalkeeper who can float 🕴 @LUFC 🧤 pic.twitter.com/FApwVg52js

— Premier League (@premierleague) December 3, 2020

We finish by talking about one specific moment last season, his save from John Lundstram in a 1-0 win over Sheffield United in September. The one-handed stop, denying Lundstram from 10 yards out, showcased everything good about Meslier: his reactions, his anticipation, his huge wing-span. Lundstram thought he had scored. Those watching from the stands at Bramall Lane saw no way he could miss. Yet Lundstram was left lying with his head on the turf after Meslier stuck out his right arm and nudged the ball around the post.

How does a goalkeeper pull off a save like that, with no time to think?

“It’s a good question,” Meslier says. “I think it’s instinct, the decision to go left or right.

“When a cross arrives from your right, the player will often shoot to your right as well. So you try to think but the time is short, half a second or less. You try to react and you try to guess. It all happens very fast.

“That was a very important save for me and the team — but more for me, I think. To make that save in the Premier League, to get a first clean sheet, it was big. It made me think, ‘Yes, you are OK’.”