tidyman said:
I think Margetson is getting a bit of unfair stick though. Made his debut at Old Trafford I think and did ok. He certainly wasn't very good but I seem to remember been in a bit less of a panic when he played than some of the other jokers mentioned.
My memory of Margetson was he wasn't generally quite as bad as some of the others but had odd patches where he was catastrophically bad. The first half against Everton on the last day of the season, when he had to be subbed for his own good, was one of the worst goalkeeping displays I've ever seen. And he made two dreadful errors in the relegation run-in that helped to send us down to the third tier in 1998.
One was the Easter game at Wolves where one of the home team's goals came from a corner he dropped into his own net. The other, not remembered thanks to Jamie Pollock's own striking error in the same match, was against QPR in the final home fixture; he allowed them to equalise Kinkladze's early strike by picking up a backpass, then handing over the ball so they could score from a quickly taken free kick. They were two really abysmal pieces of goalkeeping in the space of (I think) five games at such a crucial time for the club.
I've only been watching City since 1975, so I don't go as far back as Ronnie Healey. I do recall him coming back and playing in a cup tie with Cardiff which we won, but nothing good or bad about his display that day sticks in the mind. I suspect the worst I saw was the 43-year-old John Burridge when he played a couple of games at the end of the 1994/5 season against Forest and QPR. He wasn't a bad 'keeper at the peak of his career, but he was almost embarrassingly past it when called on to take the field for us.
The other one that strikes me as worth a mention is Kevin Stuhr Ellegaard. He's had a career in the game so must have improved, but he was dreadful when, as a young player, he first made our team. In the old days, before goalkeeper subs, you occasionally used to see an injured goalkeeper replaced by an outfield player, and the rest of the team usually used to quite obviously play to protect the replacement. Ellegaard with us circa 2004 is the only specialist goalkeeper whom I can recall making his teammates adopt the same approach.
