Barthez sets record straight on 'clown' antics

The English are supposed to love eccentrics. Margaret Rutherford, who carved out a career playing a delightfully dotty Miss Marple, described her cousin Tony Benn with the words that eccentrics had their own quality of madness and "in the final analysis they will be the saints".

Football is uncomfortable with individuality and midway through last season Fabien Barthez found himself occupying a kind of personal hell. The sprinting out of his goal and attempting to play like a sweeper had come spectacularly to grief, first against Deportivo La Coruña, then at Highbury of all places. Both matches were lost and although his manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, defended him, as expected, it was laced with anger. The Manchester United manager had told Barthez that these kind of stunts would eventually come to grief.

"After the Arsenal game people came to my house and tried to take pictures of me holding certain things," Barthez said. One of them was a handbag and one newspaper published a mocked-up photograph of a man who had won a World Cup winners' medal dressed as a clown.

"I'm not a clown, it's not nice, but there's no point in getting angry. People do not understand the difficulties of goalkeeping and to get angry with them will only harm myself. My ambition is to be remembered as a good keeper rather than as an eccentric who spent all his time running out of the box, dribbling with the ball and going up for corners. I don't do it to show off; it's a need. It's part of my game and something I have to do."

Ferguson, as befits an impeccable man-manager, gives Barthez far more latitude than others. He indulges the Frenchman's smoking and allows him time off when others, such as David Beckham, have been punished for missing training without good reason. Interestingly, in the wake of these two disasters, Barthez was unusually timid and hesitant when Manchester United came to Anfield in November 2001, a match Liverpool won easily, a sign of the United's decline and what seemed the gradual, remorseless rise of Gérard Houllier's side.

The next time United ran out at Anfield for a fixture which means more to Ferguson than perhaps any other, it was Jerzy Dudek's turn to be baited. Failure to hold a back-header from Jamie Carragher presented Diego Forlan with the simplest of goals and accelerated both Liverpool's decline and Dudek's passage out of Houllier's team. Only an injury to Chris Kirkland allowed the Pole back, although Barthez has sympathy for his opposite number in Sunday's Worthington Cup final.

"I have empathy for Dudek," said Barthez, who since his arrival in Manchester in the summer of 2000 has given no meaningful interviews to the English media. "But it is almost better to concede goals in that way than let them in because you are not fit enough or not fast enough. Any keeper can make a handling error – it's a mistake but these things happen and any keeper knows it will happen to them one day. If a centre-forward misses a great chance, it's not a disaster, there will be more coming his way. But if you make a howler like Jerzy did, you are all over the papers and you are not allowed to forget."

Houllier has proved himself intolerant of failures by his goalkeepers. Sander Westerveld, who may win La Liga with Real Sociedad this season, was cast aside forever by the Liverpool manager after allowing a tame shot from Dean Holdsworth to give Bolton victory early last season. Unlike Dudek, Barthez did not pay with his place. Ferguson argued that more than anyone else in the United dressing-room, Barthez brought a winning mentality to his team. The Frenchman also cites the support given to him by United's goalkeeping coach, Tony Coton.

It hurt more because Barthez, whose father was a fine rugby player from the game's heartland in southwestern France, had few outside interests. "I don't play golf; football is my passion. When you get past 30 your life outside football becomes more important but for me football is always on my mind. I am always thinking of my training routine and it's difficult to explain."

Curiously, given the fact that he was not a goalkeeper and is now the manager of Manchester City, Barthez's boyhood hero was Kevin Keegan. Perhaps more curiously, although they have met several times, the Frenchman has never had the courage to reveal the fact to Keegan, who will have to find a way past United's keeper for many years to come.

"I always said I intended to stay until the end of my contract [in 2007]. I have everything at my disposal to make me happy; I am playing with some great footballers, in front of fans who know we are not winning machines or robots."

Ryan Giggs (thigh), Paul Scholes (groin) and Wes Brown (hamstring) are United's major doubts for Sunday's game.