From the sepia-toned days of Robert Parlane – scorer of the first-ever own goal in an international, mishandling an opponent's long throw as his Scotland team played England in 1879 – to the modern era of your René Higuitas, Packie Bonners, Scott Carsons and Robert Greens, goalkeepers have consistently screwed up on the worldwide stage. But no netminder, however hapless, has ever shed the very last vestiges of their dignity in a manner quite like this.

It being 1938, the clip is in grainy black and white, the medium of the silent Hollywood slapstick motion picture. The leading man is Laurent Di Lorto, goalkeeper of World Cup hosts France and king of verisimilitude. After nine minutes of sparring, the Italy striker Gino Colaussi moved forward down the inside-left channel and looped a lame effort towards the top-left corner. The ball, dropping gently like a towel in an advert for fabric softener, should have been easy to deal with, but Di Lorto suddenly discovered dyspraxia, and involuntarily volleyballed the effort straight into the net, bumping, setting and spiking all in one rapid movement, a hectic flourish that really should have been accompanied by a xylophone trill.

Di Lorto's humiliation was far from over, however. This being 1938, the Italians, representing Mussolini's fascists, played the match not in their usual change strip of white, but a deliberately provocative black. Adding injury to this insult, Di Lorto, having dispatched the ball into his own goal, chased after it like a gormless puppy, and smacked nose first into his right-hand post. Dignity had flown spectacularly out the window, but Di Lorto didn't have long to suffer in public; 81 minutes later, after France were knocked out, his international career followed it.

2. GARY SPRAKE (Liverpool 2-0 LEEDS UNITED, First Division, December 1967)

Gary Sprake kept goal for Don Revie's Leeds United, one of the greatest, most successful and defensively miserly sides in English football history. And yet to this day he is remembered as being almost criminally negligent in his duties as a netminder. It's a bit of a bum deal, really, when you consider he only ever really made two infamous cock-ups during a 12-season stint at Elland Road: leaping over the ill-fated Chelsea midfielder Peter Houseman's pea-dribbler in the 1970 FA Cup final, and throwing the ball into his own net in front of the Kop at Anfield in 1967.

Throwing the ball into your own net, though. In fairness to Sprake, the match that would come to define him was being played in difficult conditions: an inch of snow on the pitch, the ball difficult to grasp in the freezing cold and the wet. With Liverpool leading 1-0 and spraying the ball around magnificently, Leeds were looking to go in at half-time to regroup. They never had the chance. A minute before the break, Sprake advanced to the edge of his area to collect a backpass. Looking to quickly recycle the ball, he shaped to throw the ball to left-back Terry Cooper, but instead the ball slipped out of his control and flew into the far corner of the net.

Whether he changed his mind mid-throw – Cooper was being pressurised by Ian Callaghan, while Roger Hunt was sniffing around the area – or simply lost his grip has never been fully explained. The Kop serenaded Sprake with a rendition of Careless Hands, but contrary to popular myth it wasn't a mass outbreak of instinctive wit. They'd been prompted by the Liverpool PA announcer, who at half-time had goaded the hapless Leeds keeper not only with the Des O'Connor hit single, but also another contemporary chart hit, Thank U Very Much by the local beat-poet combo The Scaffold. Sprake must have felt like jumping from one.

Like Sprake, Bruce Grobbelaar is a man remembered more for his failures than for successfully keeping hold of the No1 shirt in a side that defined an era. But them's the breaks when you're occasionally to be found bouncing around your area like a fly trying to circumnavigate a window. Brucie's two biggest bonuses were handed out in successive European Cup campaigns. His first continental catastrophe came against CSKA Sofia in the 1982 quarter-finals. Liverpool were 11 minutes from the semis when Grobbelaar came needlessly haring off his line in a woefully over-ambitious attempt to meet Georgi Velinov's deep left-wing cross; the sortie allowed Stoycho Mladenov to head into an unguarded net. Twelve months later he was at it again in Poland, Liverpool dealing calmly with Widzew Lodz for 48 minutes, until the keeper offered Miroslaw Tlokinski the opening goal on a plate by attempting to catch a flighted ball with one hand.

But Grobbelaar would make up for these errors against Roma the following season, writing himself into European Cup folklore, so let's not be too harsh. Instead, let's concentrate on the match that crystalised him as a clown in the eyes of many neutrals, an endearingly farcical display against Manchester City on Boxing Day 1981 which, at the time, appeared to signal the end of Liverpool as a major force.

Grobbelaar was just over four months into his Liverpool career, having replaced Ray Clemence in the summer. It wasn't going well. Liverpool had already lost four times in the league, and were languishing in 12th position, behind the likes of Swansea, Southampton, West Ham and Brighton. "Liverpool have continuing problems on the field where Bob Paisley, having built the most successful British club side since the war, is presiding over its sharp decline because he cannot adequately replace ageing components," wrote Patrick Barclay in the Guardian. "Paisley has tried the transfer market, but in recent years the likes of Frank McGarvey, Avi Cohen and Richard Money have been bought then discarded, Steve Ogrizovic and Kevin Sheedy cannot break through, Grobbelaar and Craig Johnson look hopelessly raw, Ian Rush remains merely promising. Only Mark Lawrenson and the talented Ronnie Whelan have been unmitigated successes since the days when Paisley iced the Anfield cake with Kenny Dalglish, Graeme Souness and Alan Hansen."

Grobbelaar's performance in the City game was a masterpiece of slapstick ingenuity, encapsulating Liverpool's lack of direction. In the first half, he skittered out from his goalline as though he was still high on the Christmas egg nog, missing a simple catch then sprawling around on the floor as his defenders cleared up the mess. In the second half, lessons not learned, he attempted to cradle a high ball in his arms, only dyspraxically to funnel it to the floor, allowing Steve Kinsey to lash for goal; on the line, Phil Thompson was forced to show his keeper how to make a save. Finally Kevin Reeves flicked softly towards the bottom corner, where Grobbelaar bundled into his own net, the culmination of an all-round horror show in which Liverpool, but especially their keeper, looked totally shot.

The result, and Grobbelaar's display, would indeed become significant, but not quite in the way everyone imagined it would at the time. It represented Paisley's Liverpool nadir, but also a turning point, team and keeper pulling themselves together in the second half of the season to win a remarkable championship. None of which took away from the sheer haplessness of this goalkeeping display, mind you, which added to Bruce's Clown Prince legend. "Grobbelaar's misery is complete," ran Alan Parry's famous commentary. "Reeves gets the goal, but really it was almost an own goal by this sad figure." Parry was displaying some brass neck by going there, but even so, has a commentary ever been so damning?

4. ALEX STEPNEY (Birmingham City 0-2 MANCHESTER UNITED, First Division, August 1975)

Considering they've been the best team in the country for two decades now, the modern Manchester United have made a surprisingly sizeable contribution to the canon of goalkeeping howlers. Fabien Barthez – World Cup, European Championship and Champions League winning Fabien Barthez – presenting a double gift to his France team-mate Thierry Henry at Highbury in 2002. Peter Schmeichel – unquestionably the world's greatest keeper during the 90s – famously shanking to the feet of Barnsley's John Hendrie in 1997, or inexplicably waving Paulo Futre through in 1992 with positioning that made 1981-vintage Grobbelaar look like Giuliano Sarti. And then the amazing Massimo Taibi, who played four matches for the club, won two man-of-the-match awards, and made three howling errors, a flap apiece against Liverpool and Chelsea, and that unforgettable crouch over Matthew Le Tissier's dribbler.

But sometimes the oldies are the best. And whether any of the aforementioned – or Jim Leighton – ever had as dreadful a day at the office as Alex Stepney did at St Andrew's in 1975 is a moot point. Stepney had been flattened by the Birmingham striker Bob Hatton in the first minute of the match – "laid out by a heavy charge," as the Guardian reported the day after – but opted to keep playing with a swollen face. He lasted until just after the break when, having taken another clatter going up for a high ball, he decided to direct some beneficial tactical advice to Martin Buchan regarding the last home attack. Play went up the other end, at which point Stepney's heavily swollen jaw released itself from its moorings and swung limply in the breeze. A sheepish Stepney walked off clutching the right-hand side of his face, while Brian Greenhoff took over and kept a drama-free clean sheet.

Stepney is a European Cup winning goalkeeper, who earned a sporting round of applause from the Benfica legend Eusébio in the 1968 final for his outstanding last-minute one-on-one save. Yet to a modern generation, he is principally remembered for breaking his own mouth by swearing at his mates. And letting in Pat Jennings's drop-kick in the 1967 Charity Shield against Spurs.

5. KHALID ASKRI (FAR DE RABAT 1-1 Maghreb de Fes, Maghreb win 7-6 on penalties, last 16, Coupe du Trûne (Moroccan Cup), September 2010)

This carry-on is just ridiculous.

But it's something of a surprise that keepers don't walk off more regularly. Consider the fate of Peter Enckelman in the first second-city league derby for 15 years. Sure, his cock-up in miscontrolling an Olaf Mellberg throw-in, letting it roll over his boot and into the net, was a timeless classic. Having to deal with a Birmingham fan, boiling over with the best part of two decades' worth of pent-up lower-division frustration, getting right up in his grille and accusing him of flagrant onanism was beyond the pale, though. Nobody would have complained if he'd have clattered the fan, Eejit, upside the head, instead of acting with quiet dignity in the face of extreme provocation as he did. Nobody did complain when Eejit ended up in the jug to cool off.

Tragically for Enckelman, he spent six months rebuilding his reputation with a series of solid displays, only to make an arguably worse one in the return fixture at Villa Park, visibly bottling out of gathering a headed backpass and allowing Geoff Horsfield to poke the ball past him and knock it into an empty net. The gaffe pretty much ended his career at the top level; he's currently at St Johnstone on a desperate rebuilding mission, his only high-profile match since his Villa days being the 2008 FA Cup final for Cardiff City, when... but let's not riff on his pain any more.