In 2019, Andrew Redmayne made me a coffee. I was at the training base of his team, Sydney FC, waiting to do some pre-season interviews when the goalkeeper caught me trying to use the club machine and intervened. He had taken a barista course about three years earlier, he said, because he was fed up with football and was ready to retire at 27 to work in a friend’s cafeteria.
He was then playing for Crosstown’s rivals, the Western Sydney Wanderers, and was in a miserable streak of form. He certainly did not move, and the mere idea of being selected for the national team was absurd, no matter saving a penalty to send his country to a World Cup. Fallen on the bench and slandered by many fans for no particular reason, the daily routine had taken its toll.
Redmayne’s original career plan had been to finish his career while playing and then become an elementary school teacher. But when he began to fear the idea of football, he spoke quietly to his wife and financial adviser.
“It started,” he said to the coffee machine that day. “It was economically viable to just work in one of my partner’s cafes and go to university during the day and probably only NPL at night. I was glad to see my time at Wanderers and then back in Melbourne.
“The belief in myself went into it: to be honest, I didn’t think it was good enough. It was a very hard stage in my life.”
Redmayne always had the talent. As a teenager, he tried out for Arsenal and was initially offered a youth contract before the club withdrew him and signed a young Wojciech Szczęsny. So he stayed in Australia and jumped from club to club, mostly tortured by self-doubt and cruel comments on social media, something ironic given the abundance of free memes now circulating on the internet.
Just as he was about to throw in the towel, something happened. In January 2017 he was sent to Graham Arnold’s Sydney FC with an exchange deal. The move brought him together with his first goalkeeping coach, John Crawley, the man who also developed No. 1 Mat Ryan of the Socceroos.
Redmayne’s fist hits Mat Ryan on his way to the pitch in Qatar. Photography: Karim Jaafar / AFP / Getty Images
According to his own retrospective calculation, Redmayne was “rubbish” at the time. But Crawley helped him rebuild it from scratch. And when the club’s first-choice goalkeeper, Danny Vukovic, moved to Belgium, he took his place.
Then a few more things happened. He started wearing a hot pink strip. He began to save a lot of penalties. And, the funniest thing, he started dancing. It wasn’t a great children’s dance either. A more daggy father: a plague of loose limbs that slightly entertained spectators and baffled opposing players. Thus, “The Pink Wiggle” was ordered.
“You’re a sitting duck anyway, so you can try to fly too, I guess,” Redmayne said in early 2019, three months before his heroic turn in the penalty shootout helped Sydney win the grand final of the A- Men’s League. “I just made a mistake … I didn’t save [a penalty] my whole career and now I’ve saved four this year. I don’t know what’s going on. “
Redmayne had turned a corner. He was very confident, confident in his instincts, and quoted Dolly Parton (“Find out who you are and do it on purpose”). He did not tell anyone at the club how close he was to retiring. In May 2019, after Arnold was named head of Socceroos and took Crawley with him, a 30-year-old Redmayne got his first international call.
Before the qualifying playoff for Tuesday’s World Cup against Peru, the 33-year-old now had two international catches. Until the final moments of the overtime it looked like it would continue like this, until Arnold launched his massive bet on a plan.
“They [Peru] he would have been preparing all week thinking of Maty [Ryan] he was going to be in goal, “Redmayne said after the game.” Putting them on would have shot them a little bit. “
“I don’t think any of the players knew it,” Redmayne said. “A few scored in the half because I did a few eye-catching exercises. Maty was full of support and then, just before the penalties, she was cheering me on and getting ready … when we were. a meeting said, “You have this partner, that’s all you have.”
And it was. This time, Redmayne was dressed in gray, not pink. But his routine was no less dazzling. He waved his arms and turned his legs, making a puzzling puzzle to solve Peru’s penalties. Luis Advincula hit the post to tie the Socceroos again. After a short tussle with the defender, Alex Valera finally tucked the ball home.
Then Redmayne went viral. It was partly salvation and partly celebration: not so much a smile but a “here I am” with open eyes and open mouth. In fact, the only reason he stood still instead of running straight at his teammates was because the referee had told him, he predicted that his unconventional move would probably require a VAR check to make sure. that he had not left his line.
He was still stupidly beautiful. Five years ago, Redmayne was on the verge of quitting football to become a barista. Five minutes ago, he had only played one match of the entire World Cup qualifying campaign: 168th against Nepal. He is now an Australian icon. An internationally renowned meme. The gray hero who helped the Socceroos to a fifth consecutive World Cup.