originally appeared in sun-sentinel.com

by Benjamin Crandell

Just got off the phone with rocker Robert Plant, the one-time Led Zeppelin deity whose new outfit, Band of Joy, hits Bayfront in Miami on July 31. He hinted that the new band will be nothing like the mandolin wind –powered sound that carried him and Alison Krauss to multiple Grammy Awards. But more on that later…

What he wanted to talk about first was the state of English goalkeeping in the World Cup. While he was perfectly complimentary about the play of “your boys,” he was still seething about the “Hand of Clod” goal allowed by Robert Green against the U.S. And he seemed to have little confidence in Green’s successors.

“[Green] comes from a long line of English goalkeepers, a nest of very peculiar guys, who mesmerize the crowd before they self-destruct. You’d have to be either divorced three times over or mad to go between the sticks,” Plant said.

Of the evisceration of Green in the English press, Plant was sympathetic, but said it comes with the territory.

“Over here we have a media that makes princes and kings,” he said. “They create heroes and then reduce them, emasculate them at the drop of a hat.”

But Plant said support for the team remains at an all-time high.

“Everybody is driving around [London] with vehicles covered with the flag of St. George [red cross on a white field],” he said. “It’s all very strange, like some right-wing regime from 1962.”