Hugo Lloris's fight for Tottenham place highlights the goalkeeper's plight

So endemic is goalkeeping eccentricity that it has become, to the untrained eye, almost imperceptible.

From error-prone David De Gea at ManchesterUnited to bottle-kicking Wes Foderingham at Swindon Town, we have grown to regard the most solitary figures on a football pitch essentially as a breed apart. As any readers of Ronald Reng’s unbearably sad biography of Robert Enke would attest, the world that these lonely cowboys inhabit is a place where madness lies.

In such a context can the frustration of Tottenham’s Hugo Lloris, reduced to second-choice status by Andre Villas-Boas without having kicked a ball, be seen more sympathetically. Here is a club whose obsession with goalkeepers — they now possess four of international class — borders on a fetish.

But to play sensitive souls like Lloris, Brad Friedel, even Heurelho Gomes off against one another is a thoughtless ploy. The tragic demise of Enke, haunted by demotion from Barcelona’s first XI after his error in a Copa del Rey game, illustrates how the faintest suspicion of being marginalised feeds an ingrained sense of vulnerability. We fool ourselves if we believe De Gea feels any differently about his supplanting by Anders Lindegaard.

Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita and a goalkeeper during his time at Cambridge, wrote of his favourite sporting species: “The crack goalie is followed in the streets by entranced small boys. He vies with the matador and the flying aces, an object of thrilled adulation. He is the lone eagle, the man of mystery, the last defender.

”It’s when you’re in the middle of the woods that you realise how difficult it is,” he explained in a 1957 essay for France Football magazine. “It’s your turn to go au milieu des bois.” The literary tradition of depicting goalkeeping as a paradigm of existential angst is well-established.

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