In the whole of Team USA’s tournament, Howard didn’t face
one penalty kick. This was good for him, since it’s so hard for a goalie to
look invincible against a lone player kicking a small ball into a 24 foot (7.3
m) wide goal from only 12 yards (10.9 m) away.
In World Cup competition, most penalty kicks are successful,
to the tune of about 86%. But penalty kicks come in two flavors, and that percentage
only reflects the scoring rate for penalty kicks (PK) that occur during the game. There are also PKs that
come when the two teams are still tied after extra time (we Americans call it
overtime, but of course we call it soccer too).
About 70% of penalty kicks find the back of the net in that
situation. Why is there a difference? It’s the same distance, it’s still
striker against goalie. The ball is still roughly round with those funny
geometric shapes stitched into it. Why does the scoring rate go down so
significantly?
Billy Joel told us why many years ago – Pressure! The kicker is expected to make the shot – he has such a
big advantage. Joe Bag–O-Donuts on his couch is screaming that he could make
that shot, and he gets out of breath
just opening the chip bag! Let’s investigate how big an advantage the striker
actually has, and then we can figure out why it shrinks when it’s time to line
up for PKs.
A good college or professional football player will kick the
ball so it reaches a speed of 80 mph (128 kph, or 117 feet per second/35.7
meters per second). At a distance of 12 yards, this means the whole event is
over in roughly 0.3 seconds. It takes a goalie about 0.6 seconds to move so
that one hand or foot can get to either edge of the goal! You don’t have to be
a math magician to see that if the striker can kick the ball on target, it’s
going to go in.
That’s why most PKs are aimed at the edges of the goal,
either up top, in the middle, or on the ground. Most PKs that are missed are
aimed up high, so maybe the goalie has a slight advantage there, but still, there’s
192 square feet (17.9 square meters) of space that must be defended in the blink
of an eye. Yes, it takes 0.3-0.35 seconds to blink – let’s hope the goalie’s
eyes don’t have bad timing.
FIFA changed the rule in 1997 so that the goalie can move
before the ball is struck, but it doesn’t help that much. He still isn’t
allowed to move forward. This would help him narrow the angles and reduce the
square footage he has to defend. And if he does move before the ball is kicked,
he’s really just guessing. A study of previous World Cups says that goalies
only guess correctly about 41% of the time, and guessing right still doesn’t
matter if he doesn’t have enough time to get a hand on the ball.
But goalies do have some recourse. A study by Noel and Vander Kamp (2012) suggests that focus is the key. By making large movements or
sudden moves, a goalie might just be able to distract the striker and send the
shot errantly wide or high. The study for International Journal of Sports
Psychology showed that strikers that spent slightly more time looking at the
goalkeeper as opposed to the ball or target area were stopped more often.
Their research suggested that taking a
goalkeeper-independent strategy (ignore him/her completely) was better for
making goal kicks. So the more a goalie can make you look at him, the better.
Maybe that’s why they wear bright colors.
Greg Woods’ PhD thesis for the University of Exeter also
points to a focus issue. He used 18 college football players fitted with eye
tracking software. If the striker looked at the goalie, the penalty kick was
stopped 40.6% of the time, while if he ignored the goalie, the shot was only
stopped 20% of the time.
The statistics bear out the pressure angle. The coin flip is
important before PKs because 80% of the time, the team that kicks first, wins.
Every time the first team is successful, the pressure ramps up on the second
team, because now they’re playing from behind. Statistics also show that the
first team that misses will lose about 81.2% of the time. The added pressure of
being behind is too much to overcome.
The added pressure results in a breaking of rhythm that overcomes
the muscle memory that should control a striker’s kick. It may also increase
the time that a striker is unfocused, and may look at the goalie more. Woods’ study, published in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology (2009) showed
that as anxiety increased, the striker was more likely to spend time looking at
the goalkeeper, and this tended to send PKs more centrally in the net and
therefore easier to stop.
The pressure of playing for your country in
the World Cup may also be an added bonus; some countrymen just won’t let a guy
forget a World Cup gaffe. Andres Escobar was shot dead in Colombia just days after returning home from the World Cup in 1994. His own goal (hit the ball
into his team’s net) sent the Colombian team home after group play.
Another Colombian player was murdered in 2006 in a bar
shooting. He had missed a penalty kick in the Copas Libertadores tournament a
few years earlier, of course the motive for the shooting might have been something else. The moral of the story – ignore the
goalie and don’t forget your bullet-proof vest.
Contributed by Mark E. Lasbury, MS, MSEd, PhD
Mark is writer and educator in the areas of science and
history
As Many Exceptions As Rules
Wilson MR, Wood G, & Vine SJ (2009). Anxiety, attentional control, and performance impairment in penalty kicks. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 31 (6), 761-75 PMID: 20384011
BENJAMIN NOËL and JOHN VAN DER KAMP (2012). Gaze behaviour during the soccer penalty kick: An investigation of the effects of strategy and anxiety Int. J. Sport Psychol., 41, 1-20
As Many Exceptions As Rules
Wilson MR, Wood G, & Vine SJ (2009). Anxiety, attentional control, and performance impairment in penalty kicks. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 31 (6), 761-75 PMID: 20384011
BENJAMIN NOËL and JOHN VAN DER KAMP (2012). Gaze behaviour during the soccer penalty kick: An investigation of the effects of strategy and anxiety Int. J. Sport Psychol., 41, 1-20
This article was interesting for me to read as we just read about stress and how it can affect us both mentally and physically. The goalie must feel such a tremendous amount of stress during the world cup penalty kick. Essentially having the outcome of the game fall solely on your shoulders. From what I learned in psychology if you expose yourself to small amounts of stress ( their other games) it helps to protect the mind and body from the harmful effects of stress.
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