Fabio Capello Knows His Five England Penalty Takers for World Cup 2010

Football’s attitude to penalty shoot-outs is baffling to me. For all other aspects of the game they train, practice, plan and so on in the minutest detail, but for the way many matches at knockout tournaments can be decided they leave it all to chance.

The usual defence for this approach is that “you can’t recreate the pressure”, and that is absolutely correct. You can’t. But what you can do is make the action of taking and scoring a penalty so natural because you’ve done it so often, that the action becomes second nature.

Then when it comes down to it in a crucial match, after 120 minutes of exhausting play, in front of 80,000 in the stadium and millions worldwide, you can fall back on the knowledge that you’ve done this simple action countless times and your body instictively knows what to do.

You may still miss, or the keeper may make a great save, but you give yourself a far better chance of success.

If practicing such things made no difference, since “you can’t recreate the pressure” then why did Jonny Wilkinson practice his kicks time after time? Whay does a golfer practice “easy” three foot puts? It’s because when the pressure is on they are not “easy”, but all that practice gives you the confidence to perform when needed.

Without the practice you are putting yourself in a high pressure situation with no safety net. Crazy.

But I guarantee we will hear numerous pundits drone on about how penalties are a “lottery”, and how practice doesn’t help much. You have no control over a lottery, you have a fair amount of control over a penalty shoot out.

Rant over.

Can’t argue with that Aidan. Also, I’m assuming Fabio Capello agrees with you. Can’t imagine him taking us to South Africa without plenty of penalty practice.

He does seem to be the type who doesn’t leave anything to chance, so here’s hoping he gets them practicing a lot. Frank Lampard got plenty of practice at the weekend too!

Ha, yeah. Maybe the multiple spot kick retakes are all part of a clever FA initiative?

I’ve always felt it’s a problem that stems from the caveats of procedural memory, Aidan.

I think most footballers do take that practice approach, i.e. practicing the same motor sequence until it becomes procedural memory. Thing is, the only way it works is performing the same (or as similar as muscle action can be over various actions) sequence many times. Yet you’re essentially putting the ball in the same place every time. You’ve made yourself predictable, which means that learned goalkeepers who have done their homework (Lehman, anyone?) have a MUCH better chance to stop your kick.

It is possible to try to have 2-3 different spot kicks in your arsenal, but difficult to do this without having a different “lead up” to the kick (it’s confusing to procedural memory when two different sequences have the same beginning). Again, to a learned keeper, these are tells.

Now keepers usually don’t know all possible permutations, but they don’t really need to. If you look at most penalty shootouts, a keeper only needs that slight advantage over the other keeper that allows him to save one more kick than his counterpart.

This has at least been my understanding of penalties in the several I’ve seen over the year. In penalty shootouts, players often resort to these procedural-memory-driven kicks that keepers are good at predicting (look at the RSL keeper at the MLS Cup final, or Lehman against Argentina in 2006). It’s those improvised penalties (Zidane’s in 2006 final) that are most successful… but those are difficult to be confident enough to pull off after 120 minutes in a high pressure situation.

Adler, Neuer and Wiese each have already an archive of DVDs about those five English players shooting penalties …

lol I bet the Germans already have a cheat sheet ready if it does indeed come down to a PK Shootout against the English.

There is already signs that England could get beyond their historical failure in the penalty shoot-outs with the Under-21 team progressing to the final of the Euro U-21 championships against Sweden (the hosts!!) in the penalty shoot-out!
My preferred penalty takers:
1.rooey
2.lampard
3.hargreaves
4.barry
5.ashley cole
6.milner
7.defoe
8.ashley young/ lennon/ walcott/ gerrard (adam johnson -if selected- is a specialist!)

My penalty takers:
-Lampard
-Gerrard
-Rooney
-Defoe
-Terry
-Lennon
-

dont we just love the germans when it comes to penalties? just take a moment to check out the video” this my dear is england ” on youtube…….will make you smile!…..good luck england!

Dear Robert,

the thing that unites us is the sad fact that there will be no shootout. England will march out prematurely, Germany will advance to the final against Brazil

my dear L,

the thing that unites us is the fact that the english have a wonderful sense of humour and the germans lost to us in a world cup final

i admire your arrogance however if germany progress to the final against brazil i will be dancing a samba at the final whistle and drinking taquilla!

happy new year my friend

best
r

England’s 5 spot kickers should be:

1. Lampard – best PK taker in the world for me
2. Rooney
3. Gerrard
4. Beckham
5. G. Johnson

robert,

Please, no more with the video self-promotion. It’s fine to leave a link in your name, but it’s not OK to leave multiple comments asking people to watch your video. Please only genuine, on-topic comments in future or I’ll have to mark you as a spammer.