LockerRoom: When I was young I had that body type which was described by my Irish teacher as "long string of misery" and by everyone else as plain lanky. In my innocent gawkiness I used to fancy myself somewhat as the great undiscovered talent of goalkeeping. Football goalkeeping, that is.

I was undiscovered only because I didn't actually play in goal but carried on my disastrous exploits out the field and among the subs, smug in the knowledge that when called upon to don the number-one jersey I would be a revelation, and thereafter mentors, other players and eventually fans would plead with me to tend net and I (The Cat) would stoically decline.

In training matches and the like when asked to stand under the crossbar for a while I never quite unveiled my full potential, and if there was an unresolved kink in my technique it was that I would bend my knees farther and farther as the shot approached until ultimately I faced every challenge in the kneeling position. Generally when the ball had whizzed past without hitting or grazing me I would finish my signature move with my head tipping the ground as if praying to Allah for intervention or the gift of invisibility.

For surprise shots I eschewed the use of the hand and instinctively stuck a foot out and hoped for the best. Often this was the wrong foot and very seldom did "the best" happen as hoped for, and on at least one occasion a mentor came rushing towards me with a water bottle thinking I was undergoing some sort of involuntary spasm.

Still my faith in myself as a goalkeeper was undiminished. I still secretly feel that when I am driven from journalism (later this morning, if recent developments are anything to go by) I will have the goalkeeping to fall back on.

There's more of me now and even in the kneeling position I represent a significantly bigger obstacle for forwards.

My delusions never extended to hurling, though. The communications line from my brain to the rest of my body was tragically impaired at some stage in my life and the first message transmitted whenever a sliotar would come whickering at me was the word "Duck!" The second message was one of two words: "Ouch" or "Shit." The third message was, "Should have covered face with hurley bos, not groin area."

Here's a funny thing. Take yesterday's All-Ireland football final goalkeepers. Take the keepers of the top half-dozen teams in the country. Put them in a line-up with their hurling counterparts - guys like Donal Óg Cusack, Davy Fitz, Damien Fitzhenry, Brendan Cummins - and it's the hurling goalies who'd be more recognisable.

There's something about the awful exigencies of the position which attracts larger-than-life characters. It makes you wonder why it's taken so long for somebody to write a book about hurling keepers.

My favourite hurling goalkeeper story is about a fella who was asked to play in goal for the senior team in St Vincent's years ago. The occasion was a challenge game in Cork, and our man, being an admirable individualist, explored some alternative realities on the night before the game and found himself still a little out of sync with the world when the match came around.

First minute and a shot comes flying in at head height from about the 21-yard line. Whizzes past our man's head into the net without our man moving a muscle or blinking an eyelid. The shocked silence is broken only by our man, who is still standing in the same position. He is smiling to himself now though and slowly shaking his head. He utters one word: "Wow!"

I played in goal a couple of times myself but not with the same level of distinction. Mostly my mind has blanked it out in order to protect me but I have a distinct memory of a friend's father, a Corkman, doing umpire at a game and standing behind me, and every time the ball came into our half of the field hearing a crescendo of despair issuing from him. "No, no, no, no, no. Oh, oh, no."

I was reminded of all this while reading Christy O'Connor's fine book Last Man Standing a few weeks ago and again in Croke Park last weekend watching the horrors that befell various camogie goalkeepers during the senior and junior All-Ireland finals.

The great participatory journalist George Plimpton once wrung a whole (and brilliantly funny) book, called Open Net, out of a very brief stint of playing goalie for the Boston Bruins ice hockey team. George was terrified but he should have tried hurling for perspective. Ice hockey goalies have the comfort of guarding a low-slung goal smaller than some forwards' mouths and they get to wear so much padding that the Michelin Man blackguards them with allegations of frumpiness.

(Coincidentally the other great piece of goalkeeping literature, and possibly the best sports book ever written, is Ken Dryden's memoir The Game and is also about ice hockey. If hockey goalies get to be commemorated as heroes with such a canon of work, O'Connor's work is a long-overdue commencement of a library devoted to hurling keepers).

The hurling goalkeeper, the Last Man Standing, as Christy puts it, is a rather more isolated figure standing frail against a skyful of net. It's no coincidence that practically all the guys interviewed and profiled in Christy's book are extroverts who play a larger-than-life role in their teams. There's something dauntless about hurling keepers. Nobody gets to wear a county keeper's jersey without having endured more disappointments and embarrassments than successes. And they keep going.

Just read O'Connor's description of Joe Quaid's excruciating experience in blocking a penalty from David Cuddy of Laois a few years ago for confirmation of the unique heroism of hurling keepers.

At one point in the book while discussing the build-up to a goal conceded in a Leinster final against Wexford, the Offaly keeper Brian Mullins says, "sometimes when you're playing in games you want lads to come in and take shots at you. It was kind of like that for me."

Crazy. But not so crazy as some of the stories in Last Man Standing. The stuff on guys like Ray Barry, Eoin MacMahon, Timmy Houlihan and Brendan McLoughlin reinforces the sense of "you don't have to be mad but it helps" the bigger stars radiate.

I have this theory about hurling goalies. They all have older brothers. They all have the confidence that comes from being a younger sibling and they all have the experience of having been put in goal for the older family members to take pot shots at.

Last Man Standing could only have been written by a goalkeeper, a younger brother and a fine writer. That it's so rare for those qualities to intersect in one person probably explains why it's taken so long for a book on hurling goalies to come our way.