Kepa Arrizabalaga will be the first name that many recall around the rather niche topic of goalkeepers refusing to be substituted in League Cup finals. But the ex-Chelsea stopper certainly isn’t unique. And he wasn’t the first to stubbornly refuse to leave the Wembley stage.
Thirty-five years ago, 28 years prior to Kepa making Maurizio Sarri’s head fall off, Les Sealey was even more forceful in his determination to see out a League Cup final. It almost cost him his leg and, potentially, could have taken his life even earlier than the tragically young age of 43.
Sealey was one of the last true cult heroes at Manchester United. He pitched up at Old Trafford late in his career, arriving on loan from Luton Town in December 1989, aged 32, on a month-long loan to serve as cover for Jim Leighton.
He returned to United later that season and was thrust into the spotlight by Sir Alex Ferguson when the manager needed a safe pair of hands while he sought to lay his on his first trophy at Old Trafford.
A couple of costly misjudgements in the 1990 FA Cup final against Crystal Palace at the end of a shaky season for the Scotland keeper led Ferguson to lose his trust in Leighton. Ruthlessly, the stopper he brought with him from Aberdeen was dropped and in from nowhere came Sealey to keep a clean sheet and not only spare Ferguson the sack, but kickstart the glory years at Old Trafford.
“Was he a better keeper than Jim? No, but he thought he was, and that can sometimes be important,” Ferguson later explained of a selection that stunned everyone. Including Leighton, who won’t ever again speak to his ex-boss as a consequence.
Leighton holds no grudge with Sealey, though. He carried his replacement’s coffin at Sealey’s funeral after his death of a heart attack in 2001. On that tragic day, Sealey drove himself to hospital before succumbing to a heart attack in the car park at Southend Hospital.
That bravery and stoicism summed up Sealey. Those qualities went a long way to saving Ferguson’s career while making the keeper one of United’s most popular figures during the trophy-laden 1990s.
Bryan Robson was the embodiment of the Stretford End, but Sealey captured its soul. He hailed from East London, but the cockney keeper played for United like any lifelong red would have done. He understood the privilege – not that he didn’t believe he deserved the stage – and he knew his time as no.1 would be brief, so he made damn sure to enjoy it.
Which was all encapsulated back at Wembley less than a year after Palace mistakenly thought Sealey could be intimidated, verbally and physically, in the 1990 FA Cup final.
Mark Bright and Andy Gray battered Sealey, but it didn’t matter. They could have gone through him with a Ford Sierra instead of their studs – he wasn’t for shrinking or shifting.
It was a similar story in the late stages of the Rumbelows Cup final in the spring of 1990-91. United were 1-0 down to Sheffield Wednesday and toiling. With 12 minutes to go, Paul Williams went through on goal with a chance to kill off the Red Devils.
This was a different era of goalkeeping. Prior to the Schmeichel spread and long before the catalogue of block shapes modern-day keepers now choose from. Then, keepers were still leading with hands and head with little regard for the personal safety of themselves or others.
So Sealey sprang from his line, leading left as Williams opened his right ankle and hips to side-foot his shot towards that corner. The sight of Sealey hurtling towards him, understandably, distracted the Owls forward from his finish, and the ball drifted wide of the target.
With the ball gone, the collision inevitably followed. When United physio Jim McGregor arrived on the scene, he found Sealey’s knee open to the bone. Even with no substitute goalkeeper, his assessment was that Sealey should come off.
Even to the untrained eye, it was the correct course of action.
“It was a really nasty, horrible gash and should have come off,” Sharpe later told _The Sheffield Star_. Clayton Blackmore concurred
> “His knee was cut right down to the bone. But he didn’t want to go off because he was desperate to play in the Cup Winners’ Cup final a few weeks later. He had a big, big heart.”
Indeed. McGregor, backed up by Robson and other United team-mates, knew he was fighting a losing battle as Sealey fought – literally – to stay on.
Shaking off McGregor, Robson and Denis Irwin as they sought to restrain the keeper while attempting to talk some sense into him – “Look, you stupid b\*stard, you’ve got no knee left,” the physio might have said – Sealey sprang to his feet, jumping up and down to prove it was just a flesh wound.
A brief pause in the flood of adrenaline pumping through Sealey saw the keeper offer a compromise. He would allow the physio to bandage his knee, but any further action was non-negotiable.
The look on McGregor’s face towards Robson and Gary Pallister suggested he knew it was a bad deal, but also the only one he would get. The furious manner in which Sealey tore off his sock tape removed what little doubt there may have been that he was serious.
McGregor, his concern betrayed somewhat by his Dennis the Menace cap, applied the heaviest of strappings and returned to his bench, letting it be known that he wanted Sealey subbed.
Sealey, clearly in pain and unable to flex his left knee, refused even to allow a team-mate to take the subsequent goal-kick. Downfield it went, quickly returned by Wednesday on their way to winning a corner.
Inevitably, they put it on the keeper. Of course, Sealey caught it. Their next one was played short to Nigel Worthington, the wily old Owl attempting to force Sealey into a diving save on his dodgy knee.
Wednesday saw out the final 12 minutes, forcing Sealey to limp up the old Wembley steps to collect his loser’s medal from the Rumbelows Employee of the Year.
Mercifully, 39 steps was the highest altitude Sealey climbed to that Sunday evening. As Sharpe explained:
> “Usually, after every final, we’d have a party in London to celebrate or even if we lost, but this time we didn’t because we had the Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final a few days later.
>
> “So we went straight to the airport and Les just collapsed. They reckon if he’d got on the plane, gangrene would have set in and he would have lost his leg.”
United finished the job in their European semi, Gary Walsh deputising for Sealey in a 1-1 draw at Old Trafford to cap a 4-2 aggregate win. Which gave Sealey three weeks to get fit for Rotterdam.
There was never any doubt that Sealey would face Johan Cruyff’s Barcelona. And even with his left knee still heavily bandaged, the Catalans could only beat him thanks to a stroke of good fortune around a Ronald Koeman free-kick.
That was to be Sealey’s final game as United no.1. Ferguson gave him and his stitched-up knee the night off for the Red Devils’ final game of the campaign a week later when they were joined by Spurs in parading recently-won silverware.
Schmeichel was signed and Sealey was off on his next adventure, to Aston Villa for move number five of 13 in his career. The eighth brought him back to Old Trafford where he served as Schmeichel’s understudy, playing only two more first-team games to make his last four United appearances a European Cup Winners Cup Final, two League Cup Finals and an FA Cup quarter-final.
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