Practice makes penalties
Teams figuring out shootout is more than game of chance
In the crushing heartbreak that comes with losing a World Cup soccer match in a penalty shootout, it continues to be the go-to rationalization of the fallen.
“Penalties are a lottery,” Spanish captain Sergio Ramos said after his team’s shootout loss to Russia in this year’s round of 16.
Ramos presumably won’t be the last to suggest that World Cup’s 40-year-old tie-breaking system basically comes down to a cruel spin of a roulette wheel. It’s a refrain that echoed through the ages.
And yet in an ever-more-moneyed sports universe wherein few possible performance advantages are left untapped, there exist teams that have ceased using the vagaries of destiny as an excuse for defeat. Rather than treating the penalty shootout as a matter of fate, the more reasonable idea is to treat it like any other athletic contest — as something that needs to be gameplanned in advance and practised with purpose.
Witness the current World Cup run of England, the country that nurses some of history’s deepest shootout-inflicted scars.
Led by manager Gareth Southgate, who as a player missed the penalty kick that eliminated his country from the 1996 European championship, England won a roundof-16 shootout against Colombia.
It was England’s first World Cup shootout win in four tries; the country hadn’t won on penalties in a major competition in 22 years, amassing seven defeats between victories. And there are those who’ll tell you the success only came with the acknowledgement that improvement was within the national team’s reach. England goalkeeper Jordan Pickford said he’d done “research” on the tendencies of Colombia’s presumed shooters in the lead-up to a key save on Carlos Bacca with the shootout tied 3-3. Southgate, for his part, had insisted his team practise its penalties in the lead-up to the competition. Somehow, this passed for visionary thinking.
“In the past, every England coach has said that you can’t practise penalties because you can’t recreate the pressure or the tension of the shootout,” Ben Lyttleton, author of the book Twelve Yards: The Art and Psychology of the Perfect Penalty Kick, said in a telephone interview this week. “While that may be true, that doesn’t mean you can’t practise with purpose, you can’t prepare in ways that help you get an edge when the shootout comes along.”
Tell that to Russia, which lost Saturday’s quarterfinal to Croatia on penalties. Though Russia advanced through the round of 16 by beating Spain in a shootout, they did so before goalkeeper Igor Akinfeev acknowledged his squad “definitely” hadn’t spent time practising from the dreaded spot. Perhaps that lack of preparation was evident Saturday, when Russia missed two of its five attempts en route to elimination.
The key to England’s reversal in shootout fortune, Lyttleton suggested, was in the attention to pre-match details. The team rehearsed the walk from the centre circle to the penalty spot. It took penalties after two-hour training sessions while teammates attempted to distract the shooter. It spent time consulting with a sports psychologist on penalty-spot mindset.
Not that it’s possible to fully replicate the pressure of such a massive moment. After all, the level of difficulty of depositing a ball past a goalkeeper from the penalty spot isn’t particularly high. In some minds it’s akin to an open dunk for a seven-foot basketballer, or a one-foot putt for a PGA Tour player.
“(The success rate) should be 100%,” Lyttleton said. “From a technical point of view, they should all score every time. And the reason we love the game so much is simply because they don’t.”
Heading into this World Cup, kickers had converted just 71 per cent of penalty-shootout attempts. That percentage could increase if kickers paid attention to data that researchers like Lyttleton have compiled. One tidbit: A successful strike down the middle is something like a 91-per-cent proposition. Goaltenders almost always dive to one side.
“The numbers show that just nine per cent of goalkeepers stay in the middle, and about 30 per cent of penalties go down the middle,” Lyttleton said. “Goaltenders have told me they don’t want to stay down the middle because it looks like, to the fans who are watching, they’re not trying, not making an effort. But that’s wrong.”
That doesn’t mean there isn’t ongoing debate over the key to winning penalty shootouts. According to one study of a sample of thousands of shootouts through multiple decades, the team that shoots first has a 60-per-cent chance of winning. In other words, while the shootout was instituted in the World Cup in 1978 — bidding adieu to an era that saw tie games occasionally settled by a coin toss — this data would suggest the outcome of any given shootout remains largely dependent on a coin toss, specifically the one that decides which team takes the first kick. Then again, Croatia shot second and won Saturday, as did the other three teams to advance through a shootout in this World Cup.
Maybe that is why some soccer powers have yet to be won over to the merits of systemizing the shootout. Spain, as it prepared for its shots from the spot against Russia earlier this week, appeared to hem and haw over which players ought to be tapped.
“You should not be looking for volunteers to take a penalty — it’s your job as a coach to pick the five best players in the best order of five,” Lyttleton said.
One assumes Southgate, if he was watching, shook his head at Spain’s disorganization. And in that moment he might have recognized England’s outlook of yesteryear, a haphazard choosing of lottery numbers over a calm deployment of a plan.
“If you work really hard and practise with purpose at anything, I think you’re more likely to succeed,” Lyttleton said.
“It doesn’t guarantee success. I’m not saying if you follow these methods you’re guaranteed to win a penalty shootout. I’m just saying these will increase your chances. That’s all you can do. You can’t guarantee anything.”