Chester comedian Bob Mills has caused a stir online by claiming football clubs can delve into non-league football to grab a young goalkeeper which can play at any level of the English game.
The 61-year-old spoke on national radio station talkSPORT and engaged in a fierce debate with former Wrexham manager Dean Saunders over the issue.
Mills, who attended Chester City Grammar School, believes that if clubs spend more than £5m for a goalkeeper, they are being 'mugged off' and believes that teams can find 16 or 17-year-old goalkeepers from non-league clubs with the right physical attributes and train them up.
Speaking on the radio station yesterday, Mills said: "They can spend maybe £200,000 training him and they can have a goalkeeper who will sit in their goal, or stand in their goal preferably, for the next 10 years and it’s as simple as that.”
Also on the show was ex-Wrexham boss Saunders, who suggested three attributes which cannot be taught, including anticipation, agility, and hand-eye coordination.
But Mills disagreed with the former Wales international, saying: "All those three things are exactly what you can teach. You can teach people anticipation.
"You can say to someone every day for a year ‘what will you do if this happens, what will you do if that happens’. Now I’m not saying there aren’t some who are instinctively good at one level of goalkeeping.”
Saunders further challenged Mills and brought the conversation onto strikers and why some are more prolific than others.
Mills claimed that it's because some are trained better than others, but Saunders offered a different view.
He said: "Some can what’s going to happen next, they’re a yard ahead. In every sport, Ronnie O’Sullivan’s five shots ahead of everyone, he’s a genius.
"In football, goalkeepers can actually work out, the top keepers go ‘there’s only one place he’s putting this, to my left’, and they’re already on their way."
But Mills countered that by saying that would have been drilled into goalkeepers during training.
He concluded: "I’m saying any boy or girl, because it’s a multi-sex game, who has a decent level of physical ability and is the right size.
"Obviously it’s no good taking someone who is five foot three, it’s not going to work, but who’s the right size and the right physique, I say you give me that kid for two years and I can turn you out a goalkeeper that can play very, very comfortably at any level of English football."
And Mills' view has divided opinion on Twitter.
Former Chester FC goalkeeper Alex Lynch - who left the Blues earlier this year - tweeted: "This is hands down the maddest football discussion I've ever seen. Shambles."
Ben Foster, stopper at Premier League side Watford, said on the social media platform: "I think Bob Mills has found a gap in the market... Any GK + £200K = Huge Profit. SIMPLES!"
Former Chester City goalkeeper Wayne Brown - who played for the Blues between 1996 and 2006 and is now a goalkeeping coach at League One side Oxford United - also waded into the debate.
He tweeted: "What a load of s***e. I will give Bob a 60 minute training session at @OUFCOfficial just to see how we work."
