Some Belated Thoughts About Penalties

I originally wrote this just before the World Cup after listening to the smug inaniities of Messrs Shearer, Hansen and Lawrenson one too many times. Looking back, it seems rather optimistic to suggest that England should have been practising penalties - they would have been better served working out how to pass the ball to each other.

 

As the knockout stages of the World Cup draw nearer there are two things that we can be reasonably sure of: that at least one tie will be settled by a penalty shoot out and that, at some point, a television pundit will tell us that there’s no point in practising for penalties because there is no way of replicating the pressure of the real thing.

The second part of this statement is, of course, true: it is not possible to replicate the baying, or vuvuzela blowing, of tens of thousands fans in your comfortable training facility, but to make the leap from that to saying that there is no point in practising is absurd. You might just as well say that there is little point in practising any aspect of the game, since you can never replicate match conditions, something which may have been fashionable in the 1950s but which is rather less appropriate to the modern game. It’s also an idea that would be laughed out of court in just about any other sport: it is impossible to imagine Phil Mickelson saying that he doesn’t bother practising four foot putts, for example, since nothing can replicate the pressure of putting to win a major.

What can be achieved through practice is the development of a penalty routine for each player, so that when they walk up to take their kick they can focus entirely on that in the hope that it will block out the noise and, as far as possible, the nerves. A player walking up to the spot knowing that they place the ball, walk back four paces etc. is going to be more relaxed than poor David Batty was in 1998, when he walked up not only with the hopes of a nation on his shoulders but also with no idea of what he was going to do when he got there. Recent research at Exeter University has suggested that nervous players tend to focus more on the goalkeeper and, therefore, hit the ball closer to him: a well rehearsed routine will help to take that out of the equation.

In 2009, the England Under-21s, under the management of Stuart Pearce, found themselves in a penalty shoot out against Sweden. Pearce, who, let’s face it, knows a thing or two about the pressure of penalty shootouts, made sure that his team practised and ranked the entire squad from one to twenty-three, with the surprising outcome that Joe Hart took England’s second penalty, gleefully hammering it into the top corner. The other, less surprising, outcome, is that England won.

Of course, practising penalties doesn’t mean that players are guaranteed to score by any means. Players, like John Terry or, for that matter, James Milner in the 2009 shootout, can slip, or goalkeepers can make great saves, but it is naive to think that it is enough simply to turn up and trust to luck. As Gary Player once said ‘The harder you work the luckier you get’ - if England find themselves in a penalty shootout in South Africa then let’s hope that they’ve worked hard enough to get lucky.