English journalist and writer, Ben Lyttlelton, opens each episode of The Long Walk – a new, free-to-watch docuseries available on FIFA+ – with the following definition of a penalty kick: “A ball, a player, a goalkeeper, a net. It's football distilled down to its essence.”
Kicking a stationary ball into a goal from a spot only 12 yards out sounds like a pretty easy task for players who have been practising such things from a very early age. With penalty shoot-outs, however, nothing is that simple.
This three-part documentary is full of tales of penalty heroes and, inevitably, of players who ended up being the villains of the piece. In setting out to discover what the perfect penalty involves, the series' makers speak to a host of star players, past and present, as well as specialists and academics from different fields.
This is what they had to say.
From rugby to the laws of physics
Academics in The Long Walk include Metin Tolan, a Physics lecturer at the University of Gottingen in Germany, while Clive Woodward, a former rugby coach who won the Rugby World Cup with England before becoming the performance director at Premier League club Southampton, is among the specialists. While Tolan took a theory-based approach to the penalty kick, Woodward offered a practical view. The German physicist looked at how the laws of nature could help enlighten football players when it comes to taking penalties. His first suggestion, founded entirely on logic, is that players put on a heavier pair of boots before they step up to take a spot-kick, as this will make their shots travel faster: “I don't know why they don't do it,” he said. Tolan then suggested that once they have donned more appropriate footwear, penalty-takers should aim for the parts of the goal where they are sure to score: “There are what we might call areas that are out of the goalkeeper's reach.”
Tolan's “map” of the goal is based on a goalkeeper who is 6'7 (2m) tall, standing in a goal measuring 7.32m wide and 2.44m high. His calculations consider a ball traveling at around 100 km/h when struck, which would reach the goal in 0.4 seconds. If the goalkeeper sticks to the rules and keeps their feet on the goal-line until the moment the ball is struck, there are certain areas of the goal they cannot possibly reach, even if they guess right, namely the top and bottom corners. Woodward's recommendations are based on the work of David Alred, the man who was his kicking coach during his time in charge of the England rugby team and who moved with him to Southampton. “He's the best coach I've ever seen when it comes to one-to-one work,” said Woodward. In assessing penalties, Alred identified the ideal direction that player and ball should move in, describing it as a letter “J” lying flat on its back. “The player takes a straight run-up, which means that the ball goes in a straight line too, before rising halfway through its trajectory [making a J-shape as it goes],” explained Woodward. “Alred had noticed in training sessions that lots of players made a C-shape when running up to and kicking the ball, with that shape being replicated in the flight of the ball, which is not ideal.”
Anything but a lottery
Knowing how to kick the ball and where to place it is all very well, but all that technique and know-how is no good without players being able to withstand the pressure that penalty-taking involves – perhaps the most important aspect of the whole art. When it comes to shootouts, there are two different camps: those who see them as a lottery, and practice as a waste of time, and those who believe such a dramatic and decisive part of the game should be meticulously prepared for. Lothar Matthaus, who captained the West Germany side that won the 1990 FIFA World Cup Italy, said they practised penalties every day. Practice made perfect for the Germans in the semi-finals when they beat England in a shoot-out, just one of the six they won between the 1982 World Cup in Spain and UEFA EURO 2016.
For all the work that he and his team-mates put in on the training ground, however, Matthaus, a Germany legend, acknowledged that it had its limits: “You can train all you like but you can't prepare for actually doing it,” he said. “You can't train for the atmosphere, the pressure and the tiredness you feel after 120 minutes.”
The Long Walk features a number of teams who have all seen preparation differently. At the 2002 finals, co-hosts Korea Republic were put to the test by their Dutch coach Guus Hiddink, who came up with some innovative practice sessions designed to take his players out of their comfort zone. Accepting, like Matthaus, that recreating the pressure generated by a full stadium would be impossible, Hiddink did everything he could to ensure his side were not just going through the motions when practising penalty-kicks in training, continually changing the dynamics to keep them on their toes. It worked, as they went on to beat Spain on penalties in the quarter-finals.
The Dutchman and the German are both in agreement that penalty-taking requires a cool head. “You know the whole world's watching, but you've got to put that out of your mind,” said Matthaus. “You have to focus on what really matters and keep your mind on that. When you're walking up to the spot, you can even find yourself thinking about the next day's headlines. But when the moment comes, you've got to be focused.” “It's the calm players who shut out all the noise around them that have the most success,” said Hiddink, who four years earlier had led Netherlands to the semi-finals in France only for Brazil to beat them on penalties.
The Southgate Method
Perhaps the most rational approach to the thorny issue of the penalty shootout was that taken by current England coach Gareth Southgate. Appointed in 2016, the former centre-half took charge of a side that, in stark contrast to Germany, had lost its last five shoot-outs. Southgate had been a ‘villain' in one of those painful defeats, missing his kick in a semi-final shoot-out loss to the Germans on home soil at EURO 1996. The Long Walk features several contributors with views on England's demise that night, and they are all agreed on one thing: the national team had always almost treated penalties as a sideshow, as something not worth devoting much time to. As one defeat bled into another, however, the dreaded shoot-out became a national trauma.
Southgate made wholesale changes when he came in and identified penalty shoot-outs as one of his key priorities, treating them with a level of detail that impressed his players. “We talked about which side to put them and we had our own shoot-outs at the end of each training session,” revealed former international Ashley Young. “We weren't just practising penalty kicks either. We'd stand together in the centre circle and everything. When we went up to take them, we knew we had to relax, breathe and wait just the right amount of time. Then, once we were focused, we were ready to take the kick.” The statistics revealed in the series back up Southgate's approach. Players who take a slow run-up score 80% of the time, while those who run in faster convert only 60% of their penalties. In setting out the procedure players should follow in taking a penalty, and in carefully selecting which players should be given the task, coaches take on responsibility for the process, relieving the pressure on the players and instilling them with confidence.
The Southgate Method paid instant dividends. When Jordan Henderson missed in the shoot-out that decided England's Round of 16 tie with Colombia at Russia 2018, his team-mates kept their composure to give the Three Lions a long-awaited penalties win. The English went on to reach the semis, their best World Cup campaign since 1990. Three years later, they went one better in front of their own fans at EURO 2020. Though they lost that final on penalties to Italy, the feeling was that this was no insurmountable drama, merely a setback for a team that now knew its way around a shoot-out, would learn the lesson, and come back stronger.
