Behind the penalty, the shrinks

[Jonathan Fairfield]

Behind the penalty, the shrinks

LUIS ACOSTA / AFP

Penalty-taking: a no-brainer, right?

There you are, 11 metres (12 yards) from the goal -- no defender in front, as much runup as you want and a keeper who cannot move off his line. What's not to like?

Well... how about heart-stopping stress? The pressure of knowing that with a single kick, you will become either a national hero or a national joke?

It's no surprise that when the World Cup moves into the knockout phase, where penalty shootouts determine tied matches, psychologists are there in hand-holding mode.

Players can be "crippled" by the shootout, says Geir Jordet, a professor in sport psychology at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, who has discreetly counselled many stars on how to cope with the ordeal.

"One player told me that as he was in the centre circle, waiting to walk to the penalty spot, all he could think was, 'does it show on television that my knees are shaking so much, I'm so nervous?'"

The world's most confident penalty-takers are Germany, which has won all four of its World Cup shooutouts.

At the other end of the scale is England, which wretchedly has lost all three and in 1998 even brought in a faith healer to try to overcome the players' inner demons.

"England couldn't hit a cow's arse with a banjo," the great physicist Stephen Hawking said in May, using an expression rarely heard in cosmology.

Introduced nearly 123 years ago, a penalty attempt will result in a score between two-thirds and three-quarters of the time, according to data from top-flight European club football.

But this statistical advantage for the striker is a mental advantage for the keeper, says Jordet.

If the keeper fails to save a penalty, he will get sympathy; if he succeeds, he will be covered in glory.

"The shooter, though, always faces the expectation that he should score. You know what's expected of you, and if you don't score, you become the scapegoat for the whole team and the whole nation."

According to mathematicians at Liverpool's John Moores University, the perfect penalty is a ball that is struck high and in the corner at between 90 and 104 kilometres (55-65 miles) per hour.

Anything faster boosts the risk of inaccuracy -- which explains why the "just blast it" principle so often fails -- and anything slower is easier for the goalie to intercept.

The tension between the laws of physics and the state of the mind has bred innumerable tactics as sides try to outfox one another.

Jordet says his team has studied videos of every single shootout in the World Cup, European Championships and Champions League and interviewed nearly three dozen players to build up ideas about the duel.

Goalies, for instance, love "look-at-me" tricks to distract the striker.

Liverpool's Bruce Grobbelaar's wobbly moves in the 1980s earned him the nickname of "Spaghetti Legs" -- a tactic that inspired his club successor, Jerzy Dudek, in a famous shootout in the 2005 Champions League final against AC Milan. Fans put together a novelty dance song, "Du the Dudek," in his honour.

On the striker's side, there's help, too.

For mental strength, strikers should be supported by team-mates -- the group huddle is important -- and coaches must be willing to talk about penalty dread.

And the watchword is practice, again and again.

One technique, derived from research in the 1990s by Joan Vickers at the University of Calgary in Canada, is "quiet eye training."

In this, a striker uses an eye tracker device to condition himself to gaze at a target spot -- the cherished top left and right corners of the goal -- before stepping up for the kick.

By rehearsing over and over, the player not only improves speed and accuracy, but also focuses on the task in hand, making it easier to shut out pressure, crowd noise and the goalkeeper.

-- (c) Copyright AFP 2014-06-27

[Jonathan Fairfield]

Penalty shootouts: Tricks of the trade

The penalty shootout is a mind game -- and here are some of the favourite ploys:

LOOK AT ME

Watch for goalkeepers with wobbly legs and a goal-line jiggle, all intended to distract the striker. The tactic is also helped by fluorescent or bat-winged jerseys and outsized gloves, designed to make the keeper look bigger and the goalmouth smaller.

SEEING RED

Scientists say red -- associated with danger or anger, which is why at times of stress we pay more attention to it -- is the most effective colour for keepers. Experiments at Chichester University, southern England, found that a keeper let in only 54 percent of penalties when wearing red, compared to 69 percent for yellow, 72 percent for blue and 75 percent for green.

BE MY FRIEND

A keeper classic: Go up and shake the striker's hand in a sporting gesture, pick up the ball and stroke or pat it -- and then put it back slightly off-centre. All this takes control away from the striker, forcing him to look at the keeper and abandon his preparatory rituals to readjust the ball.

PUT IT OVER HERE

Dutch researchers found that goalkeepers who positioned themselves just slightly off centre -- no more than 10 centimetres (four inches) off the centre of the line -- give a subconscious prompt to the striker as to where to place the ball.

The kicker is 10 percent likelier to go for the slightly wider side of the goal mouth, giving the keeper a useful predictive advantage.

DO YOUR HOMEWORK

Prep work can be a neat guide to the taker's preferences or a goalkeeper's weakness.

In the 2006 World Cup, German keeper Jens Lehmann cunningly tucked a piece of paper down his sock from his coach ahead of a quarter-final shootout against Argentina. The note successfully predicted which way each striker liked to angle the short (low left, high right and so on). The crumpled paper later fetched a million euros ($1.35 million) for charity.

ALL IN GOOD TIME

Time favours the striker. Researchers have found that if he takes the penalty within three seconds after the whistle has blown, he gets an element of surprise; if he waits at least 13 seconds, the agonising delay unsettles the keeper.

-- (c) Copyright AFP 2014-06-27

ri/tw

[RickBradford]

A penalty-taker should always have fixed in his own mind where he is going to place the penalty, even before he approaches the penalty area. No ifs, buts, or maybes. That removes any uncertainty in his own mind, and renders irrelevant all kinds of gamesmanship from the goalkeeper.

For example, there is a class of penalty taker who just lash the ball as hard as possible in the direction of the goal every time -- they rarely miss.

It's when the player changes his mind -- even as late as during his run-up -- that problems start to happen.