Penalties are no lottery…football and science!
They are deemed
to be among the worst 'cruelties' of football. They have inflicted an endless
stream of 'injustices' on heroic football teams, it is said. But are penalties
really a lottery? Science has turned its attention to the apparently random
phenomenon of penalty kicks, but its findings will not be welcomed by many
football fans - especially the Italians and the English.
It seems that
those who fail at penalties only have themselves to blame. Researcher John
Williams of Liverpool John Moores University has found that far from being pure
chance, expert goalkeepers are much better than novices at predicting where the
ball will go and getting there in time. The key to success is an ability to read
the clues in the striker's posture just before he kicks the ball, he told
'Nature' magazine.
So in
penalties, as in other areas of football, training is the key. 'Science suggests
that you can minimise the effects of luck by training goalkeepers and penalty
takers,' Williams is reported as saying.
Williams
compared a group of goalkeepers who had played in the Dutch national league with
some who played for fun. The keepers watched goalie's-eye videos of players from
top Dutch team PSV Eindhoven taking penalties. They used a joystick to predict
which way the ball would go, and tried to move the stick into position before
the ball would have crossed the line.
Experts 'saved'
more than a third of the penalties, novices only about one-quarter. And even
when they didn't get to the ball, the experts were more likely to pick the right
direction.
A penalty-taker
will try to disguise where he is going to kick the ball. But it's hard to hide
one's intentions completely. In the fraction of a second before they kick the
ball, penalty-takers can betray themselves with the angle of their kicking foot,
or by how they plant their standing leg. A good goalkeeper, perhaps
instinctively, seems to know this.
Though these
findings may make painful reading for some football fans, they could help their
teams' strikers to disguise their kicks better - or help their goalkeepers save
more penalties. |
