and othersThe Leeds goalkeeper was once considered so good that French fans joked that Hugo Lloris would sleep in Illan Meslier’s pyjamas for inspiration. Rewind the clock to the summer of 2020, and the 20-year-old not only helped Marcelo Bielsa’s side earn promotion to the Premier League, but also nearly played a pivotal role in Leeds finishing the season in ninth place.
The 6-foot-6 Breton was long considered the surest way to replace Lloris as his country’s first choice goalkeeper, with decent assessors likening him to Belgium’s Thibaut Courtois and Italy’s Gianluigi Donnarumma. “It was a very enjoyable and cherished time in my life,” Meslier said as his team prepared to face Southampton in Sunday’s Championship play-off final.
“I was so young then and didn’t understand what was going on. It was only later that I started to realise what an incredible thing it was. I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity. To be a 20-year-old playing goalkeeper for Leeds is quite rare.”
Perfection is a flame that many touch but only a few can sustain, and perhaps inevitably, Bielsa’s £5m signing from Lorient struggled initially with a team that was doomed to relegation last spring. As managers were replaced and the defence collapsed in front of him, Meslier became a scapegoat. After conceding 22 goals in seven games last April, memories of the eight promotion-winning games he played in place of the suspended Kiko Casilla four years ago began to recede.
But Meslier is resilient and a year on, the 24-year-old is Daniel Farke’s first choice goalkeeper, despite the experience still being fresh from Sam Allardyce’s decision not to use him for the final four games of the season a year ago.
“Obviously it hasn’t been easy, there’s been a lot of change at the club,” Meslier said at Leeds’ training ground. “It’s been tough but you have to deal with these things, you have to take a break and be strong enough to jump back in and I think that’s what I’ve done.”
“But the difficulty with this position is that you have to be perfect every week. Usually, if you make a mistake you concede a point. Even if you’re on 10/10, everything can change in the last moment. You have to be totally focused.”
The bad news for Southampton is that his concentration was honed first at local club Lorient, where he joined from a school in Brittany, and then by an Argentine coach. “Marcelo Bielsa didn’t say much,” Meslier says, “but there was always a bit of pressure in training. Mentally there was always a high level of discipline, which helped my mentality to be very good, especially in terms of distribution.”
Bielsa wants his goalkeepers to be dexterous with their feet as well as their hands and Meslier, who played in a variety of outfield positions before acting as Lorient’s emergency substitute goalkeeper in a youth tournament, has proven himself to be the ideal sweeper-keeper.
Crucially, he was hardened by Lorient’s training, which included frequent boxing sessions, to compensate for his continued scrawnyness but also to prepare him for a “tough discipline” life under Bielsa. “It was easy to adapt, thanks to the mentality that Lorient instilled in me and the maturity given in the academy,” he says. “When I came here, the hardest thing was the language. I didn’t speak any English, not even the basic words, and I was far away from my family and friends.”
Having achieved impressive fluency, Meslier sought professional help. “I’m not ashamed to say I’m working with a psychologist,” he says. “I think I needed it.” Their sessions helped the former France Under-21 international put his initial label of “the new Lloris” into the correct context.
“It always happens when a young goalkeeper starts,” he says, “everyone expects that in a few years he will be one of the best and play for France or Spain or somewhere. But that’s not the case. Ability comes with experience. You don’t always make the right decisions, but when you make mistakes you get better.”
“It’s hard for fans to understand that for a goalkeeper it’s a process that takes years. Unfortunately, making mistakes is the best way to learn. The important thing is to understand why you made the mistake.”
With hindsight, he can put Allardyce’s decision to replace Joel Robles as manager in the right perspective: “Sam took my confidence away, of course. I would have said it was unfair at the time, but it’s not easy in these situations. A year later I see I was very vulnerable. I think I tried to help the team too much. In these situations you have to understand that you can’t do more than what you can do in your position,” he says.
“It was a dark moment. It was difficult. But I learned a lot. I’m so grateful that from day one I felt such trust in Daniel,” she said. [Farke] “What he gave me. I was so happy. Now I want to give something back to him.”
