The point and pointlessness of practising penalties
Twelve yards. Two players. One ball. And a whole world of data and psychological intrigue.
In the first season of the Premier League the team I supported was involved in a title race. I was a fanatical child, not only fortunate enough to attend matches and stand on the famous Holte End at Aston Villa, but an obsessive hoarder of information and knowledge.
But I didn’t have experience or context. I didn’t know that it wouldn’t happen again until I was nearly forty years old. I didn’t have even the slightest notion that when it did, finally, all these years later, it would have nothing at all to do with the Villa.
Coventry Sphinx have stayed in touch at the top of the Uhlsport United Counties League Premier Division South all season but the door has remained steadfastly shut now for several months, making it easy to target second place and ignore the possibility – mathematical only a few weeks ago – of more.
Results have conspired to spoil my peaceful denial and, technically, Sphinx’s destiny is now in their own hands. With six matches left there’s a long way to go and nothing ever goes to plan this far out. But only a coward would settle for second in this situation and, honestly, I have no idea how to handle it.
I guess acceptance is the first stage.
The point and pointlessness of practising penalties
As an England supporter of a certain vintage I was brought up to fear and detest the penalty shoot-out. Football’s great winner-takes-all tie-breaker is too much to bear. There’s no lottery: this is a matter of steel, nerve and muscle memory. I lacked all three as a player.
This season has done nothing to soothe my penalty sore. Coventry Sphinx played in four cup competitions and were knocked out of them all at home, three of them by shoot-out. What’s noticeable when I look back on those matches isn’t the handful of spot kicks that were missed but the quality of the ones that were scored.
Sleaford Town, West Didsbury & Chorlton and Coventry City all came to, er, Coventry in various cup competitions this season and took an array of crisp penalties to secure their progress. It would have been impressive if it weren’t such a kick in the plums.
West knocked Sphinx out of the Isuzu FA Vase and have themselves been eliminated since. We’re now at the semi-final stage and holders Newport Pagnell Town are still standing. They play in the same division as Sphinx and their penalty prowess has to be considered beyond doubt at this point.
The Swans have played five rounds so far and beat Leighton Town and Atherstone Town on penalties in the Fourth Round and Quarter-Final respectively. Penalties have been a reliable source of goals for them in the league, too.
Penalties are back in the news at the moment because of IFAB, your friends and mine as well as the law-makers of the beautiful game.
The Penalty Kick is covered by Law 14, to which the following amendment will be added from next season:
“The goalkeeper must not behave in a way that unfairly distracts the kicker, e.g. delay the taking of the kick or touch the goalposts, crossbar or goal net.”
IFAB classifies this as a clarification rather than a change or addition. Under the catch-all offence of ‘unsporting behaviour’ this sort of thing is already outlawed. We all know the reality is somewhat different. Players gonna play.
You’ll have noticed that the updated Law 14 doesn’t include any such clarification around sporting behaviour on the part of the penalty taker.
Goalkeepers are to be anchored to the goal line and freshly unable to exercise the few weapons in their arsenal to gain some small advantage with the odds already loaded against them, while takers are permitted to employ all manner of silly shite to throw off the stopper. Enforcing a standard, unbroken run-up would be the easiest rule in the world to change. Public outcry about Emi Martínez is weak justification to go further the other way.
The gloved fraternity is unsurprisingly displeased by this development but it’s just the latest chapter in the rich and tragic saga of the spot kick.
Each penalty in the measurable professional game has an xG (expected goals) value of between 0.76 and 0.79, depending on your statistical supplier of choice. On that basis they’re three times more likely to be scored than not, which makes sense when you think about it.
At the time of writing the players who’ve scored the most penalties in the Premier League this season – five each – are Erling Haaland and Ivan Toney. Alexis Mac Allister is one behind. Harry Kane, Aleksandar Mitrovic and Said Benrahma are one behind that. Haaland, Toney, Mac Allister and Benrahma are yet to miss or have one saved.
65 penalties have been awarded in the Premier League thus far. 52 were scored, which puts the overall success rate in England’s top division this season at 80%. Only three clubs are yet to score one: Crystal Palace (two attempts), Liverpool (one) and AFC Bournemouth (zip).
Four out of five spot kicks being scored does not a lottery make but that’s not exactly new. There are whole books about this stuff yet that turn of phrase persists.
We all know it’s not a lottery. We know that Haaland is a robot, Toney is a penalty master and the spot kick is a game of skill, but the human being is a simple beast and putting into words the utter despair and fear wrapped up in the shoot-out is beyond us.
‘Lottery’ fits nicely not because chance trumps sporting ability, but because an element of chance – or something like it, at least – is introduced to an otherwise straightforward footballing task by the fact that it’s bloody scary to take one in the tie-breaker.
I wasn’t much of a player in my youth but if I was good at anything, it was scoring goals at the very modest level at which I played on Sundays.
My record of scoring penalties in regular matches was solid (read: basically perfect because I just smacked them towards a corner) but when it came to penalty shoot-outs my brain leaked out of my ears and my bottle went completely. As far as I can remember I missed every time.
As much as scoring a penalty is demonstrably a skilled task, in those circumstances it also takes confidence and bravery. That’s why the subject of practising penalties is perhaps more interesting than it should be.
It’s impossible to replicate the intense pressure of a shoot-out in a training environment. That’s obviously true and is a valid reason to doubt the effectiveness of penalty practice. For most players there are more pressing needs.
But so what? The point of practice isn’t in question.
You can’t replicate the heightened tension of a vital penalty just like you can’t fake the icy reality of a medical emergency. Paramedics train for those because it’s their job to deal with them. That’s different to the occasional spot kick for the average footballer but preparation and repetition equip us to perform in the moment because the mechanics become second nature.
That’s the theory. As a capable striker who consistently collapsed into a heap of shivering bones at the thought of taking a penalty, I know there’s a little more to it.
Maybe it’s impossible to recreate the circumstances but it’s definitely possible to be reliably able to overcome them. That’s a matter of skill and spuds and character and practising in the daylight so you can shine when the spotlight is burning a hole through the back of your skull.
All of this has been studied and written about at length. We have the data. We know the science. Despite that, there’s an air of mystery around the penalty shoot-out specifically that I both love and abhor depending on the outcome. It’s not something that can just be grabbed and understood. That’s not how people work.
The beauty of football’s bizarre test of fortitude is that it generally takes place between evenly matched athletes on a physical level yet it’s difficult to truly know because so much of it happens behind the eyes.
There’s no substitute for true experience. As I stood forlorn at Sphinx Drive, watching West Didsbury & Chorlton breezily sweep and slot and smash in the coolest set of penalties you could ever hope to see, I couldn’t help but think that the only practice that’s actually worthy of the name is doing it for real.
West won their Second Round and Third Round ties in the FA Vase this season away from home, on penalties, by four kicks to one. They beat Sphinx 3-1 in the shoot-out in the Fifth Round and it was evident that they’d succeeded before. Sphinx had missed out both earlier in the season and in the same round of the Vase in 2021/22.
Penalty shoot-outs are the scars of the past and future. They don’t exist in isolation but in series. Sphinx themselves rode the momentum of shoot-out wins not so long ago. West, finally, were beaten on penalties in the Quarter-Final. When their next one comes around it will be coloured by the last.
Perhaps that’s the bit that can’t be rehearsed.
“Mainly he confirmed what is already clear, that he is now by some distance England’s best creative attacker; and their greatest hope, along with Jude Bellingham, of continuing to improve in the next 14 months, and of looking, finally, like a genuine champion team.”
Barney Ronay assesses Bukayo Saka and England after his wonderful goal for the Three Lions against Ukraine at Wembley.
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Salty beef extracts
The impossible job: inside the world of Premier League referees (The Guardian)
FA warned ‘pool of refs is almost dry’ as grassroots officials quit over fear of abuse (i)
Goal of the Week
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