People equate some crazy reflex stops to being good at shot stopping, when in truth aside from 1 or 2 seasons DDG was average at best. But, we'll be hearing this shite everytime a goal goes in, Onana has been brought in to help the team play a certain way. In one game you can see straight away how he operates and the impact it has.
Onana has some crazy reflex stops as well, at Ajax he made some impossible stops and they changed their training of goalkeepers in the youth acadamy to some things Onana did.
This is from a Dutch article a couple of months ago translated with google:
It is striking that Onana has prevented goals that seem certain, especially in the bottom corners. This is due to a posture that Ajax initially wanted to unlearn.
Until the sports scientists at Ajax decided to test Onana's deviant technique.
Ask any Dutch goalkeeper coach what the ideal position is for a goalkeeper and chances are the answer will be: the feet should be shoulder width apart.
So they looked strange at Ajax when Onana made his entrance. His legs were much wider than shoulder width for a shot, an unorthodox technique he had apparently taught himself at Barcelona.
That intrigued Vosse de Boode. Ajax's head of sports science and data analysis decided to investigate with her department whether the assumptions about keepers were correct. "We used to think we knew how a keeper had to be ready," she told the science program Kennis van Nu. 'We gradually found out that this is not the case at all. A lot of things that we youth players have learned are not optimal for a shot from close range.'
Ajax experimented with numerous questions. How deep do you bend your knees? How wide will you stand? What is the Optimum?
This appears to be subtly different for every keeper. That depends on leg length, push-off power and the angle in which you leave most easily. The most important lesson is that goalkeepers should not drop, but push off when shooting towards the bottom corner. That turns out to be Onana's greatest strength.
"Onana dived to the corner much faster than our own keepers," De Boode said in the podcast POM. 'That wider stance made it much easier to push off to the corner. Actually almost like a skater does. With the narrow position you actually only went up. But the goal is wider than it is high. So you actually have to use your power to the side.'
Onana naturally does this exceptionally well. Together with his explosiveness, that has brought him to the final of the Champions League. And in the Ajax youth keepers are now trained according to his standards.
