Jordan Pickford: There’s only one thing that will make Everton goalkeeper ‘great’ – time

It’s Merseyside derby weekend and on Saturday night I’ll be appearing at the Epstein Theatre in Liverpool with my old derby-day rival Bruce Grobbelaar. Bruce has a different perspective on football and it’s always interesting to listen to him when he talks. He’s been through a war which must give you a different sense of what’s important and what’s not important.

I do think he was vastly underrated as a keeper. The thing with Bruce was he made 1,000 decisions a match, more than anyone else, and if you’re making 1,000 decisions they’re not always going to be the right ones. He took more chances – or calculated risks – than any other goalkeeper. He was flamboyant, which meant people tended not to examine what he did – he was always about being proactive, he had a really good mind and he saw things really early.

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I’ve heard some people say the Everton and Liverpool have their best goalkeepers since Bruce and I were playing. I hope so. There’s been a lot written about Jordan Pickford and how good he is, and he’s really good. There’s only one thing that can make him great, though, and that’s going to be time. Time makes you great. He is proving week in, week out he’s a very good goalkeeper, and if he does it for the next 10 seasons he will be right up there.

As for Alisson Becker, he looks big, he looks solid but he needs time to settle. He’s taken a couple of chances in games and been caught out but he’s helped by the fact Liverpool’s defence has got so much better as well. He’s definitely different from the other two they had. Loris Karius was really slow when he first came into the team – he made mistakes because he was so slow in what he was doing, and it took him a while to get used to the pace of the game. Funnily enough, in the Champions League final I thought he was trying to move the ball too quickly and it caught him out. I felt sorry for him. I thought Simon Mignolet was half-decent but if he hadn’t done anything for a while he’d go chasing stuff to do and you can’t do that.