We Need to Talk About Joe Hart's Existential Crisis

Illustration by Sam Taylor

I remember reading an interview once with Stephen Hendry, in which he said that when he first started playing snooker as a kid, he just didn't think it was hard. He could see all the adults around him, struggling with their cues, endlessly chasing the black around the table, swallowing wounded pride in gulps of lager, but when he tried it himself, he couldn't see what all the fuss was about.

I think that's probably how the best footballers at our respective secondary schools felt as they slalomed round the rest of us in the playground. To the normal kids, who probably weren't even good enough to play against our own fathers in Sunday League, it seemed that these peers of ours had been blessed by a higher power. That they were destined for greatness. Or – at the very least – to come on in the 63rd minute of an international friendly at some point in their lives. But none of them ever did. None of them even came on in the 63rd minute for Brentford. None of them had that certain something that it takes to convince people to pay you to play football. That certain something that, come to think of it, millions of dads probably look for in their young sons during their weekly strolls around the park. Maybe Marcus Bent's dad saw it in him, as he watched him bully callow centre halves on the playing fields of the school next door to mine. I think Michael Mancienne might have grown up nearby, too. That's the closest my small part of the world ever came to achieving greatness in the modern footballing era.

But clearly, some of those kids who seemed destined to become footballers did become footballers. And if there's one player who's got "best player in his year" written all over him, it's Joe Hart.

Granted, he's not an outfield player. But most goalkeepers weren't when they were at school, because they were simply better than everyone else at everything. When he was 13, Paul Robinson was probably the best trequartista in Yorkshire. You can imagine Hart started off up front, grudgingly going in nets one day to replace a kid whose collarbone he'd just shattered, only to realise that he was just as good at it as he was at most other things – being Head Boy, playing county cricket, fingering the hottest girl in the year above, geography lessons. In a way, we all went to school with Joe Hart. He's one of life's winners; an everyman, an Übermensch and an arsehole all at the same time.

But much like the miserable school bully pasting their ugly wife and fat children into your Facebook feed, or Philip Roth's crisis-ridden Swede Levov in American Pastoral, Hart is now finding out that the wider world isn't school. It's hard out here. The thousands of men calling you a wanker every weekend aren't interested in the good work you did in the first half, let alone your school days. A tricky South American centre-forward won't try to spare you any embarrassment because you won a piffling Premier League trophy a couple of seasons back. Football is a cruel, laughing Jabberwocky filling your trophies with its piss.

His series of recent blunders have seen him sent to the bench, replaced by the gangly goal golem Costel Pantilimon, who so far has done a solid job, even if he does look like an ogre wearing the head of an Inbetweener. Poor Joe has been forced to look on; he's become a man whose existence seems increasingly distant. He's both dignified and sour-faced, a gum-chewing Napoleon in Elba, patiently awaiting his second shot at glory.

Will his chance come? Perhaps, but there is an undeniable air of demise about this season's Joe Hart. Looking at him in his current state, he seems like a Golden Boy who's started to rust. An English jock who saw the abyss once in a nightclub toilet and can't stop thinking about it when he's on the job. A spikey-haired Samson given a buzz cut by fate. He seems haunted by the idea that one day it might all just disappear. That petrified, helpless look that falls over his massive face every time he goes to pick a ball out of the back of his net is the physical personification of "losing it".

In golf, they call it "the yips". In darts, they call it "dartitis". In science, they call it "focal dystonia". But in football, they just call it "a bad patch". "He'll find his feet again, he always does," they say. But the awful truth is that not every footballing fuck-up story has a redemption arc. Sometimes it just gets worse and worse and worse, careers turning into tragically extended versions of those Danny Baker gaffes videos, and eventually you end up like David Bentley; existing in a state of perma-loan, passed from Blackburn to West Ham to FC Rostov and back to Blackburn again like a dog that keeps biting the children.

It's hard to understand how David Bentley became a reference for people who don't know much about football to find common, sadistic ground over. Perhaps it was because he commanded a high transfer fee that he's become a byword for falling off the radar, or perhaps it was the speed at which it happened, or maybe it's just that god-awful haircut that drove a stranger to punch him in the face in a restaurant. But at least people keep track of his career (albeit only for schadenfreude). Many other players of his generation don't get such a privilege – like Kieron Dyer, who stopped being a "thing" so long ago that no one's even bothered to update his Wikipedia page to say that he's retired. He's almost a player who doesn't really exist, standing inside and outside of English football culture like Schrödinger's cat with a recurring knee injury.

Bentley, Dyer, Chris Kirkland, Wayne Bridge, Shaun Wright-Phillips, Kieran Richardson, Steve Sidwell: these and many others are English football's "nowhere men"; the guys who went from being potential world-beaters to benchwarmers, contract squatters and amateur DJs so quickly that we barely even noticed they'd gone. Actually, Sidwell and Richardson were probably never much good, but what are they now? Just another couple of ghost pirates in Fulham's haunted ship of nevermen and dilapidated flair players.

The truth is that for every Rocky Balboa or Rickie Lambert story, there's another story that's just so depressing nobody even bothers to tell it. The story of the guy or girl who nearly had it, but then… didn't. A story not just without a comeback or a last-second touchdown, but also without even a proper tragedy to sink your teeth into. A story like that of David Duval, the brash young face of American golf who won 13 PGA tournaments in the four years leading up to 2001 and then one day, just lost it. Within a year of his last PGA win, he'd dropped to 80th on the sport's money list; a year later he was 211th and now he's basically fallen off the radar altogether – still plying his trade somewhere but so unrecognisable from the man he once was that it'd take his mother to ID him.

All of football's sad young men have developed bad cases of the "career yips". You could attempt to tease out the causes behind career yips forever, trying to locate a tipping point, a point of no return, a common link in all of them, but you'd find red herrings all day long. You could say it's a phenomenon seen most commonly among players who move to big clubs at a young age but there are plenty who have succeeded. You could say it was lifestyle that caused it, all those all night cheeky Vimto sessions with Helen Flanagan and Kevin Nolan. But Kaka has been a shell of himself for years, and he's one of the most devoutly religious and humble footballers out there.

I think it's something a bit more intangible, a bit more existential. Looking at Joe Hart's transformation from the tongue-wagging, changing room Flashman he once was, to the shell-shocked accident machine that he is now, you can't help but wonder if it's something deeper than just relationships, or money, or football that's caused it. It could be something in his soul. At the risk of asking a question straight out of AS-level Philosophy, if a man can no longer do the one thing he's spent his whole life doing, is he the same man?

It's a question Joe surely asks himself every time he finds himself face-to-face with the grass after a speculative lob from a Hull full-back goes over his head.

Time will tell if Joe Hart will pull up a chair and join the endless game of poker that Messrs Dyer, Wright-Phillips and Bentley have been playing since the days when Pro Evo was better than FIFA, or if he'll go on to become a legend. Right now, it's impossible to tell. The silver lining is that while Hart used to be an easily hateable figure, with his boorish posturing and tedious "110 percent from the lads" post-match plati-views, he now seems somehow more human. In his demise, he has found humanity. In his fallibility, he has found a type of grace.

So we must welcome Joe, to the real world, the world of people who are shit at football. Because for now Joe, you are one of us.

Follow Clive (@thugclive) and Sam (@SptSam) on Twitter.

Previously – Roy Keane and Martin O'Neill Are Just What Irish Football Needs