A blindfolded boy with his hand in a pot: in favour of penalty shoot-outs

By Max Grieve

Imagine this for a moment. In little over a month’s time, England, having finished as runners-up in their group at the European Championships, are playing Spain for a place in the semi-finals. Roy Hodgson’s men are literally filling the face of the goal; Gerrard instructing a human-tetris formation between the posts and the bar — and it’s working. Spain, like Barcelona and Bayern Munich before them this season, are struggling to take advantage of their overwhelming dominance. Somewhere else, Gary Neville gurgles in delight. The whistle comes; then sounds again as the two sides begin extra time. There are no goals.

Germany await the victors in Donetsk, and with no way of separating the teams, a 14-year-old boy is called onto the field, his eyes blindfolded, and asked to draw lots. The stadium is plunged into a deafening silence. After a moment, the boy holds Spain’s name above his head, and the artists in London begin photoshopping Hodgson’s face into a root vegetable for the next day’s front page. England are out; Spain are through. And they were so close.

It is all hypothetical, of course, but it is based in history. In 1954, Turkey met Spain in Rome to determine which side was to go to the World Cup in Switzerland. They had played two legs beforehand, and with one win apiece, this was to be the conclusive match. It ended 2-2, and a small Roman boy named Luigi Franco Gemma, the son of a stadium employee, was picked to draw one name from a pot to decide who would progress to Switzerland.

“We shut ourselves away in the dressing room feeling utterly dispirited,” said Adrian Escude, scorer of Spain’s second goal. “[We thought] that there was nothing more we could do, that everything had gone so badly that the kid wouldn’t pick our name. And of course he picked Turkey. The disappointment was tremendous. We felt helpless.”

Last week, Sepp Blatter spoke, and, though it had been determinedly doing so for the previous four-and-a-half billion years, the planet stopped rotating to listen. “Football can be a tragedy when you go to penalty kicks. Football is a team game; when it goes to one-on-one it loses its essence. Perhaps Franz Beckenbauer, with his Football 2014 group, can show us a solution, perhaps not today but in the future.“

Perhaps Beckenbauer can. Perhaps not today. Perhaps Blatter, rather than designate the hard work to others and comment on the cultural differences between Latin America and South West London or the length of female footballers’ shorts, could try to come up with an idea of his own. 

In those black-and-white days before the concept of the penalty shoot-outs was conceived, drawn matches (where a winner was needed) would go to a replay. If that match was also drawn, there would be another replay, and so on and so forth until a winner had been determined. There were variations, and in major competitions where a replay was not possible, lots would be drawn. Are penalty kicks such a “tragedy” compared to the utter helplessness of randomly drawing a winner?

Many appear to believe them to be one and the same. After Bayern Munich dumped the Real Madrid juggernaut out of the Champions League on penalties in the Bernabeu, Iker Casillas perpetuated the myth that penalties are football’s answer to Russian roulette: “The penalties are about luck, and that is just what it is. [They] are a lottery”. Said club director Emilio Butragueno, “The shoot-out is like the toss of a coin.” Simply, it is not. Indeed, to state that the task of scoring from twelve yards with only the goalkeeper to beat is comparable to a “lottery”, a quintessentially arbitrary event, is to belittle the abilities of some of the world’s greatest players. 

Arguably, the penalty shoot-out reduces football back to its purest form. There is a ball, a goal, and a goalkeeper. That a player should miss a penalty is not luck, rather a blend of poor preparation and a delicate nerve. Conversely, if a player has not hit his penalty weakly at the goalkeeper or off target, it is either anticipation or reactions that has seen their shot saved.  This said, of course, a goalkeeper rarely admits to just having “guessed” which way his opponent was going to shoot: he will generally claim to have read the movements of the hips, whether they are opened or closed; the way the taker is looking; or the shape of his run-up (it’s here I’d like to dispel the common notion that goalkeepers are lucky; they, like most other humans, do what they do for a reason). There are a number of factors that see a penalty scored, or not scored. Luck is not one of them.

Clearly there are alternatives to penalty shoot-outs, though none seem to be quite so fair; so absolutely just. Under the current rules of the game, the two sides enter extra-time knowing what awaits after a further half-hour has been played. If one team has not practiced penalties (an increasingly popular excuse), it’s their fault. If they choose to take their chances, and hope that their opposition are worse at shooting from twelve yards than they are, then that’s their prerogative.

It is an undoubtedly cruel invention: where a side might lose in normal time having conceded the only goal of the game in the first ten minutes, there is something particularly brutal about the match being brought down to one, solitary kick. There is the walk from the halfway line; the eternity that the taker spends staring intensely at the ball; the crushing weight of thousands, and often millions, of hopes. For all the events in the preceding 120 minutes, if this relatively simple shot doesn’t go in, he misses out on the World Cup, or the Champions League, or the Essex Olympian Football League Division Three.

Yet this drama is what makes the penalty shoot-out great. Thankfully, Franz Beckenbauer supports this view. Speaking a day after Blatter, he said that shoot-outs “bring emotions into play, and are a lot more attractive than the toss of a coin.”

For any veritable neutral, there can be nothing worse than a late winner in extra-time. Last week, I watched two Copa Libertadores quarter-finals. I couldn’t have been more pleased when both, played one after the other, went to penalty shoot-outs. Universidad de Chile overcame Libertad, and Santos scraped past Vélez Sársfield, which will mean something to someone, but very little to me. The Santos goalkeeper, Rafael, pointed to his right as his opponent approached, and left a gaping space to his left as he moved across the goal. His mind burnt to a crisp from trying get his head around game theory, the striker hit his penalty to the right of the goal, and Rafael shot down to save. It was brilliant.

We lose moments like Roberto Baggio’s devastating miss at the Rose Bowl. Like John Aloisi streaking across the Sydney Olympic Stadium; shirt in hand and chest on show. Like Panenka’s legendary audacity. Like Dudek and Grobbelaar’s wobbly knees; like John Terry’s disastrous footing. Like the Zambians singing on the sidelines; like Fabio Grosso’s contorted face in Berlin; indeed, like Dider Drogba winning the Champions League for Chelsea with his final kick for the club. They are all moments as iconic as any other; with sheer, unadulterated drama only serving to further the emotional impression. Paul Doyle writes, "following the intense physical and technical demands of the previous 120 minutes, an additional psychological layer is added. Excellent.”

If the worst happens, and we do find ourselves sitting through two hours of insipid, unattractive, characterless football at some point over the next month, at the very least we’ll get to revel in the unparalleled highs and despair in the plunging depths of a few shots from twelve yards. Keep your children with their grimly decisive fingers for the sidelines, Sepp. Let us have our joy, and our pain.

For the time being, penalty shoot-outs are staying, though as one can never be sure how long Sepp Blatter will live, he’ll no doubt have another crack at getting rid of them. Cruel as they can be, are they not the fairest way to decide drawn matches?