Beasant's helping hand

Simon O'Hagan meets the man who has held the fort for Southampton

NO GOALKEEPER has a monopoly on eccentricity, not even Bruce Grobbelaar. Indeed, you only have to look at Southampton's reserve keeper to be reminded of that.

For Dave Beasant, a player forever associated with the rise of Wimbledon in the Eighties, this has not been the happiest of seasons either. "You get used to playing first-team football," he says. "Now I've had to get used to not playing. You ask anyone in my family what I'm like on Saturdays at the moment. Grumpy, difficult. It's a different me."

This is lunchtime last Wednesday, the day after Grobbelaar's arrest, and Beasant is sitting drinking tea in a hotel on the outskirts of Southampton, waiting for the hours to pass until he meets up with his team-mates for that night's match against West Ham. In Grobbelaar's absence, the gloves will pass to Beasant. "I feel I've been playing well enough this season to get in the first team," he says. "But this is not how I would have wanted to be selected."

Beasant, 36 tomorrow and married with three children, was reluctant to move from his home in Gerrards Cross, in Buckinghamshire, when he signed for Southampton from Chelsea in November 1993. So this hotel is where he stays before home matches. As it happens, the West Ham team are staying here as well. One or two of them, Tony Cottee, Matt Holmes, stop to say hello to Beasant on their way to the lifts. Harry Redknapp, the West Ham manager, comes by. He looks at me, and he looks at Beasant. "He's not from Malaysia, is he?" he says.

According to Beasant, this is the only vein in which Southampton's players have spoken about the Grobbelaar affair. "We haven't talked about it too much," he says. "I suppose it's hard to when you've got someone involved at your own club. We've had our cracks and jokes, which you need, because if you didn't then something really would be wrong. At most clubs you can make light of almost any situation. Banter is what team spirit is all about."

As a former Wimbledon man, Beasant understands that better than most. And as a goalie, he is a member of that club within a club - the goalkeepers' union that binds his cause to that of Grobbelaar and all those others who, as Beasant puts it, "are prepared to put their heads where most people would think twice about putting their feet".

Beasant, a great improviser whose gangling frame advancing upfield was a familiar sight long before most goalkeepers dared leave their area, identifies particularly with Grobbelaar, seeing something of his individuality in himself. "People have been critical of some of the things Bruce has done," he says, "and they've been critical of some of the things I have done. Bruce was always unique and in my own way I suppose I was too."

Not that this made yielding his place to Grobbelaar at the start of the season any easier, even though Beasant accepts that the consistency of previous years had begun to desert him. Everyone remembers the penalty Beasant saved in the Cup final against Liverpool in 1988, rather fewer that he won two England caps in 1990 and was a member of the squad that went to the World Cup in Italy that year.

The realisation that he was likely to lose his place to Grobbelaar came not when Southamp ton signed him ("He was a free transfer, so I thought, well, fair enough") but on a pre-season tour of Holland. "We hadn't been doing particularly well, and then Bruce arrived with his shirt with No 1 on it. I think he was trying to hide it from me. And to be fair to Bruce, he saved a penalty in the first match of the season. I thought, here we go."

The squad system is there to try to ensure that everyone feels involved, but the difference between playing and not playing is inescapable. During warm-ups, Grobbelaar practises whatever he wants to. Beasant has the more subservient role of, say, providing Matthew Le Tissier with someone to test his fancy shooting against. Beasant did play in three first-team matches in October, when Grobbelaar was injured, but then it was back to bench-warming and playing for the reserves in front of a few hundred spectators.

"Some people have said to me: `What's the problem? You're still getting paid, and there is less pressure,' " Beasant says. "But you go into football to have that pressure, to play in front of 20,000 people every week. It's been very difficult to adjust."

Off the field, the roles are reversed. It is Beasant, a qualified coach, who conducts the goalies' training session with Grobbelaar and Neil Hopper from the youth team. That was the scene at Southampton's training ground on Monday, three guys just getting on with it, not thinking, or at least not talking, about what might lie ahead. It was the same again on Tuesday, except that now there were only two.