I have had a long-standing interest in penalty taking in football.
There are a number of posts about penalty shoot outs in the Clyde Street blog.
The Germany v Italy shoot out at the UEFA Euro 2016 tournament has given me an opportunity to revisit some of this work.
My record of the shoot out can be found here.
I enjoyed revisiting the shoot out after reading an account of Germany’s use of SAP SportsOne software. SAP suggest that the software offers performance insights that “improve game preparation and player performance by uncovering insights into match data that can help you create winning strategies, rapidly evaluate in-match and training situations, and adjust strategies accordingly”.
What was interesting for me in the data from the shoot out was that Gigi Buffon, the Italy goalkeeper, used his considerable experience to dive the correct way in seven of the nine German penalties taken. Manuel Neuer dived the correct way for four of the nine penalties (as well as the correct direction within the game for Bonucci’s penalty).
My record of the eighteen penalties is:
- 11 goals
- 3 saves (2 Germany, 1 Italy)
- 4 misses (2 Germany, 2 Italy)
- 16 right foot penalty takers
- 2 left foot penalty takers
- 17 goalkeeper independent penalties
Reviewing the shoot out took me back to reading Peter Handke’s book Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter and Wim Wender’s film The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty.
It took me to Kurt Prodel’s video compilation of Italy’s and Germany’s penalties. The video is no longer available but he managed to aggregate each team’s penalties.
Photo Credit
Euro 2016 (Richa Yadav, CC BY 2.0)
Postscript
Darrell Cobner shared this alert with me after finding my post.
Attention towards the goalkeeper and distraction during penalty shootouts in association football: a retrospective analysis of penalty shootouts from 1984 to 2012
J Sports Sci. 2016 Jun 13:1-7
Philip Furley, Benjamin Noël, and Daniel Memmert
Summary: In the present study, we tested the consequences of attention towards goalkeepers in association football penalty shootouts that have exclusively been derived from laboratory experiments. We conducted a retrospective analysis of all penalty shootouts during FIFA World Cups (1986-2010) and UEFA European Football Championships (1984-2012). We linked key variables of previous laboratory research to observable behaviour in the field that was coded by two independent coders. The following hypotheses were tested: first, attention towards goalkeepers results in more saves/better goalkeeper performance; second, goalkeepers can deliberately distract penalty takers by drawing attention towards themselves which results in less accurate penalty kicks/better goalkeeper performance. Results were in line with previous laboratory analyses as they showed that attention towards goalkeepers resulted in more saves/better goalkeeping performance. Further, if goalkeepers distracted penalty takers this also resulted in better goalkeeping performance. The applied implications of these findings are discussed for both goalkeepers and penalty takers in association football.
Their paper has thirty-five references to the literature.
