What if I miss? Inside the mental pressure of a penalty shootout

“I have a lot of matches and a lot of experience, but this is unique – the final of the World Cup is unique. If I thought about the real situation, maybe it would break my mind and I would miss the penalty.”

When a player with the stature and mental strength of Alessandro Del Piero feels the pressure, the torment of football’s loneliest walk is laid bare.

It’s only about 41m from halfway line to penalty spot, but that walk is more than enough time for those taking penalties in a shootout to consider the ramifications of missing, and for seeds of self-doubt to take root.

This is the point when football’s team ethic is stripped away and individualism steps into the spotlight. Score, and you will likely be just a footnote in history. Fail, and infamy may well be inevitable. No spurned open goal or catastrophic defensive error will ever be framed quite as personally as the miss of a penalty in the crucible of a shootout.

Fresh chapters have been added in the past month to the never-ending narrative around how football decides those contests where there has to be a winner – from Italy’s defeat of England in the final of Euro 2020 last month to Canada’s remarkable triumph over Sweden in the women’s Olympic final, both on penalties.

The latter became a study in what happens when fatigue and emotion get mixed with pressure, resulting in seven of 11 kicks being missed or saved before Julia Grosso converted to win gold for Canada.

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A month ago, meanwhile, defeat on penalties settled around England’s shoulders like a familiar shawl, with the tactics for the shootout dissected as much as the 120 minutes of actual football that came before. Did England coach Gareth Southgate err in choosing players aged 19, 21 and 23 to take penalties (and miss them)? What is the best way to choose the five (initially) who will step forward? Should goalkeepers react on instinct or on data-driven insights?

The management of shootouts has become an arm of coaching in its own right, but the biggest variable remains the frailty of human nature.

“For lack of a better word, you’re kind of sh****** yourself,” says Leigh Broxham, the Melbourne Victory veteran when he looks back at taking a penalty in the 2010 Grand Final shootout, aged just 21. The fact he scored with apparent comfort, after agreeing to coach Ernie Merrick’s request, belied a rather less assured feeling inside.

“On the outside it was, yeah, no problem, I’ll take it,” Broxham recalls. “It was kind of a big deal for me, being pretty young. But equally you just wanted the responsibility, to show that you could do it on that stage.

“I didn’t know which way I was going to go the whole way I was walking towards the spot, to be honest. The cliche is to pick a side and go that way but I was so nervous I just didn’t know which way to go. The whole way down, I was thinking, do I go left or go right or go left or go right. Or go down the middle.

“That’s it, put it down the middle so I’m just playing safe. But then I saw [goalkeeper Clint Bolton] go a little bit early so I just opened the body up and went the other way. Yeah, it wasn’t quite as straightforward as it looked.”

In fact, when you watch the footage now Broxham looks utterly unfazed – just as he did in scoring against the same opponents in the shoot out at the end of the 2017 Grand Final. Similarly Brandon O’Neill, in that same 2017 final, appears implacable on approach to take a kick for Sydney FC. Only when his shot goes in does a trio of kisses blown to the stands reveal what was inside his head.

“If people ask, the lads’ll usually say they’re just thinking about where to put the ball, the power and technique,” O’Neill says now. “But all I could think about was my mum, my dad, and (wife) Nicole, I just knew they were going to be sh****** bricks.

“It was the same in the 2019 grand final as well (when O’Neill also scored as Sydney beat Perth on penalties). I knew my ma would have had tears rolling down her face, looking away, Nicole would have been grabbing her hand and my dad would have been just a nervous wreck.

“In a weird way, they kind of brought it back down to reality. I was like, how sick’s this? I get to have a Grand Final with family there, and be part of the penalty shoot out, so it kind of made me chuckle inside my head. I just thought, you’ll be alright, just stick to your process and you can laugh about it afterwards. Which thankfully I did.”

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Maybe it’s just hindsight, but both Broxham and O’Neill looked likely to score. Others don’t, especially when a goalkeeper is watching every step of your approach.

“Do they look confident? Their body language shows a lot,” says Liam Reddy, the Perth goalkeeper who saved a remarkable four penalties against Adelaide in the 2019 A-League semifinal, and also scored one himself just for good measure. “You know in a game situation that you’re usually facing a confident kicker because he’s the (main) penalty taker.

“In a shootout it’s a lot different because generally the fourth or the fifth taker – even the third one sometimes – doesn’t take penalties in games.

“That’s where you can look at their run up, how they put the ball down. You can really see in some players that they don’t want to be there. And that’s a good sign when you’re a goalkeeper.”

In that game against Adelaide, Reddy had a dossier on likely takers for United – common practice now in a sport where data analysis is at the heart of so many decisions. When goalkeepers emerge as heroes, very often they quote the factsheet from their coach that made them dive the right way. But not always.

“The first save I made was from Isaías,” Reddy recalls. “Diego Castro had already missed (for Perth) going the same way and we didn’t have anything on Isaías in terms of (previous) penalties. He’s walking up and I’m literally looking at him and thinking, Spanish players always like to go across their body. I think Isaías thinks he’s a bit of a Diego Castro, he’s obviously their best technical player, I think he’ll do the same thing.

“When he started to run up, in my head I was like, sh**! He’s actually going to go where I think he is! So then I was trying to hold my position long enough on the line, not to go early, because I knew that he had it in him to go the other way. And when I made the save, I was like, How the hell have I done that? Literally, the only real reason I had been going that way was because our Spanish player went the same way.”

BELOW: Gallery – Reddy leaps to the rescue for Perth in semifinal shootout

There’s no doubt that goalkeepers at certain points enter the zone, where their saves seem almost preordained. Three of Reddy’s saves that day came from Adelaide’s last three penalties, starting with Papa Diawara.

“He took the sixth penalty, and when your number nine isn’t in the first five, and he’d taken penalties for Adelaide that season, that told me he wasn’t confident in his penalty taking,” says Reddy.

“So he would then revert back to just trying to strike the ball hard and probably go where he’s always gone. And I knew before he walked up that I was going to save it, that’s how confident I was because he had shown me with his body language and his decision not to kick in the first five that he wasn’t confident in his ability. And when I saw him walking up, I’m like, this is brilliant, perfect.”

The fact that Diawara was 31 at the time jars with the criticism of Gareth Southgate for choosing three of his young players to take penalties, two of them substituted on just before the end of extratime for the purposes of the shootout.

In fact, as former England striker Michael Owen pointed out, the ages of players who had missed penalties in shootouts for England before this year ranged from 24 to 32, but all bar two were 26 or older.

“There are so many factors involved – you can have five designated takers, but a lot can change that during a game,” says Gary van Egmond, now assistant to the men’s national teams but in 2007 the head coach of Newcastle when they lost a semifinal on penalties to Adelaide.

The two players who missed were Vaughan Coveny, aged 34, and Stuart Musialik, who had just turned 22. “Stuart was very assured as a young player and technically was very good which is one of the things you look for,” recalls van Egmond.

“You’re looking for composure. Scoring penalties at training is easy. It’s completely different in front of a crowd. You can look at a player’s character but it’s no guarantee.”

The thing that stuck in Leigh Broxham’s mind, watching the final of the Euros last month, wasn’t so much the ages of Rashford, Sancho and Saka. The UEFA stats show that the latter two were on the pitch for one minute, and touched the ball twice.

“You just feel that when you’ve played the 90 minutes, and then another 30, you’re a lot calmer,” Broxham said. “You’ve played the whole time and yeah, you’re tired. But you’ve just been through the whole game, run through the emotions.

“When I saw those guys coming on in the last minute, not only are they younger but their one job is to score a penalty. There’s enough pressure to do that if you’ve played the whole game, let alone if you’ve been subbed on to do the one job. The pressure is just huge.

“When you come into the game a bit later to take a penalty, your energy is still super high, and you’re a lot more nervous and unsettled.”

Maybe that’s why, when it came to the crunch of a penalty in the shootout to decide the 2006 World Cup final, Alessandro Del Piero decided to crack a joke to himself.

“What I thought was funny things, it is a feeling moment, not a technical moment,” he recalled. “So I said to myself: Ale, it doesn’t matter, it’s only maybe three billion people who watch this moment, it’s ok!

“What you have to do is make them happy or not happy, and I’m lucky because that day I chose happy.”

Del Piero (furthest right) joins his Italian teammates in celebrating the elation of 2006 World Cup victory