No time for 46-year-old Barry Richardson to bask in a clean sheet on Wycombe’s emergency

It seems safe to assume that Barry Richardson was the only goalkeeper in the Football League last weekend who spent Sunday morning looking for a prom dress for his teenage daughter. But then Richardson is the oldest man to have kept goal in the English professional game this season by some distance.

Richardson, 46, is the Wycombe Wanderers goalkeeping coach, a man who had not played a league game since 2002 prior to coming on as a 15th-minute replacement for the injured Alex Lynch in his side’s League Two fixture at promotion rivals Plymouth Argyle on Saturday.

Indeed, his last clean sheet had come playing for an England Veterans side against Scotland in the 2014 Seniors’ World Cup final in Thailand. Yet he provided the perfect response to the home fans’ chants of “Where’s your Zimmer frame?” as he became the first visiting keeper to stop Plymouth from scoring in a league game at Home Park this term. “I do defy the laws of gravity every now and again,” he quips, though he was soon back to reality. After a seven-hour journey back home to Lincoln, he found his wife and children already tucked up in bed – and in no mood to allow him a lie-in the following morning. “I got woken up nice and early because I’d forgotten but we’d organised to go prom-dress shopping,” he says. “So it was straight back down to earth.”

Richardson still has some way to go to become the oldest goalkeeper in English league history. That record belongs to Neil McBain, manager of New Brighton, who was 51 when he took over as emergency keeper during a Third Division North match against Hartlepool in March 1947. “I’ve got to keep myself fit for another five years,” jokes Richardson, who used all his experience to frustrate a Plymouth side featuring nine players not even born when he made his league debut for Scarborough in 1989.

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There was no panic, he recalls, as he swapped his trainers for his boots, but rather a sense of “nervous excitement” as he took a good-luck hug from manager Gareth Ainsworth and stepped into the fray. “Experience is massive – the experience of been there, seen it, done it, being able to be calm and organise the defenders in front of you, to be able to talk with them. I hope to give a calmness when you’re under the cosh away from home and 1-0 up. The things that tend to go when you get older is your power and your strength to spring up to those top corners and spring down low, sharp.”

The result was his first league shutout since March 2002 – and a sweet moment for a man who had broken his leg when he last played a competitive fixture, for Doncaster Rovers in the Football League Trophy in 2005. “It was surreal, it was a lovely feeling – a feeling that, I obviously, hadn’t had for a long, long time,” adds Richardson, who chose to focus on a coaching career in his early thirties after the 2002 collapse of ITV Digital meant “there were a lot of clubs then not carrying two senior goalkeepers”.

Richardson, whose former clubs include Preston, Lincoln, Northampton and Halifax, plays in goal once or twice a week during training matches at Wycombe but limits his training work to the gym. “I don’t do as much diving around because it does take its toll on your body – it takes a lot longer to recover,” he says, and he will be back on the bench tomorrow when Wycombe host Luton Town. With the previous first-choice custodian, Matt Ingram, sold to Queen’s Park Rangers prior to the Plymouth trip and Lynch now injured, the club this week recruited Ryan Allsop on loan from Bournemouth. “They have been fantastically supportive financially,” Richardson says. “They are covering the bulk of the cost, so he will come in and play. I will sit on the bench.” Back where a man of his years belongs, clean sheet or no clean sheet.

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Neil McBain (aged 51)

Oldest Football League player – New Brighton manager who was an emergency keeper in 1947.

Stanley Matthews (50)

Legendary winger made his final appearance for Stoke City in February 1965 – in the First Division.

Kazuyoshi Miura (48)

Japan striker signed a contract extension at Yokohama in November to take him into his 50th year.