Last night, Atalanta’s Mateo Retegui stepped up and scored a penalty in the 51st minute with the score at 0-0. David Raya was in goal for Arsenal.
The double save that followed was the decisive moment of the opening match of the 2024–25 Champions League for both teams and the main reason Arsenal left Bergamo with a point from a goalless draw.
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Raya is calm and uncomplicated and is no longer underestimated
When Raya got to his feet after the second stop, he let out a huge scream and was surrounded by his teammates.
Here, The athlete‘s goalkeeping expert, who played the position professionally in the US and Europe for over a decade and now coaches goalkeepers for a club in the Swedish league, analyzes these saves and examines how Raya developed the technique that enabled him to make these saves.
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The briefing: Atalanta 0 – Arsenal 0 – Raya’s brilliance, Odegaard misses and is Serie A a threat?
It wasn’t the first time this season that Raya blocked a shot of this magnitude.
Against Aston Villa on 24 August, he made a similar save against Ollie Watkins by throwing his left hand in front of the ball, again with the score at 0-0.
With every rescue, the outcome of the game was in the balance.
There is an element of luck involved in such saves, but goalkeepers are responsible for their own luck. Being in the right place at the right time is a skill that not every goalkeeper has. The only way to achieve this is to save hundreds of shots over weeks, months and even years on the training pitch. If you don’t maintain a high standard (basically perfection), you leave the opportunity to make the difference in a game to chance rather than skill. The phrase “you play as you train” is especially true for goalkeepers.
Strikers miss chances, midfielders miss passes and defenders miss tackles, but very few of these have the immediate, game-changing impact of a goalkeeping error. Perfection may not be realistic, but it is the goal.
During training, when the field players are working on passing or tactical drills, you will often see the goalkeepers on the sidelines doing agility drills where they repeatedly jump over cones and hurdles and dodge obstacles to save balls. The more examples and situations you work through, the more seamlessly they will translate to the field.
As goalkeeping coaches, we plan training sessions down to the smallest detail, whether the focus is on individual development, preparing for an opponent or improving a specific aspect of the position. It is crucial that the exercises remain realistic. This video of Arsenal goalkeeping coach Inaki Cana and Raya from their time together at Brentford four years ago is a great example of this type of exercise.
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Raya thanks Arsenal goalkeeper coach Cana for Atalanta’s double save
The familiarity and understanding has developed over the years and has been key to Raya’s development over the past year since joining Arsenal from Brentford.
Pay particular attention at the 40-second mark, the actions Cana imposes on Raya are clearly similar to those he carried out against Villa and Atalanta.
Back to Bergamo. As we can see below, after the first save of the penalty, the ball bounces in the other direction, but Raya is aware that after his dive he can turn his head and continue to follow the trajectory of the ball.
When he realises the ball is still in play, he turns his head on the ground, sees the ball bounce towards Retegui and immediately jumps back up. In a split second he turns his body back towards the ball and runs towards the back post. Had he hesitated for even a moment, Retegui would almost certainly have scored from the rebound.
Although this was a tense scene, Raya did not seem stressed. It is almost as if he exuded a certain calm amidst the chaos. In this moment, you cannot consciously process everything that is happening – Raya had only milliseconds to react. Then his instincts, honed by all those hours on the training pitch, kick in. He reaches behind the body line with his left hand and deflects the second shot away from the goal at the last second before it crosses the goal line.
His footwork also played an important role. Fast feet are a solid foundation for any goalkeeper – they get you from A to B and it’s important to get there as efficiently as possible.
What’s special about this play is how quickly and seamlessly he converts his crossover step into a larger power step before lunging at the ball. He could have instead turned a quick side shuffle (or two) into a power step to deflect the ball in this situation. Would that be wrong? No, but it wouldn’t be the most efficient option.
Raya needed to get from his right post back to the center of the goal as quickly as possible and the crossover step was the quickest and most effective way to do this. A sideways slide would have taken too long to cover the space.
In the next pictures you can see Raya in the middle of the crossover step…
… before moving toward the ball with a more powerful step.
The quick crossover step into a power dive helped Raya cover more than half of the goal in a snap. His footwork allowed him to get a big left hand behind the ball. Using the crossover step instead of the side shuffle may seem like a simple adjustment, but not every goalie would execute it successfully.
We should also highlight the angle at which Raya approached his goal – without that angle, he probably wouldn’t have saved the second ball. When he shot across the goal, he threw himself slightly backwards rather than forwards at the ball.
His decision to jump in this way gave him the crucial angle to bring the ball to safety. It sounds strange to say that a goalkeeper should throw himself backwards, but had Raya attacked the ball at a different angle, he may not have had the right angle or timing to hit the ball with enough power and strength to save it.
As fast as Raya was shooting toward the goal, the icing on the cake was his ability to turn around and orient himself at the last second by throwing his left hand back.
Towards the end of last season, Raya started to show his true potential, but it took him a while to find his rhythm.
It’s understandable why he was hesitant – joining Arsenal was a big step. Fans loyal to incumbent goalkeeper Aaron Ramsdale didn’t initially welcome him with open arms and he trained daily with the goalkeeper he was soon replacing, but who hadn’t done much to warrant a substitution.
Competing under such pressure, knowing that someone is breathing down your neck and your every move is being closely watched, is not easy. Yes, Premier League footballers are paid well to cope with this, but we should not forget the human factor. Even the best players suffer under pressure.
And as we can see below using the Expected Goals on Target (xGOT) metric, Raya has been in excellent form this season. It’s a small sample size, but his saves prevent a goal roughly every other game compared to the statistically average goalkeeper.
Arsenal’s decision to part ways with Ramsdale this summer was best for everyone, especially Raya.
The pressure that comes with having Ramsdale lined up and the club’s full support gone can do wonders for a goalkeeper’s recruitment.
It’s hardly surprising that we’re now seeing the best version of him.
(Top photo: Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
