Researchers try to formulate the perfect penalty shot

"It's a mental battle," agrees Richard Ginsburg, a sports psychologist for Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, as well as the author of "Whose Game Is It Anyway?" written for athletes who need to perform under stressful situations like a penalty shot.

"The advantage is on the kicker," Ginsburg says. "If it was in their backyard, they would score with their eyes closed," he says. "But the pressure is also on him. To me, it's about how much the goalie tries to distract the shooter."

Just before German goalkeeper Jens Lehmann faced Argentina in a shootout last week, he took a little piece of paper from his sock and appeared to consult it. Although no one knows for certain, European media reports said he had directions on the kicking styles of the Argentine players taken from a website run by the son of a former coach of a pro soccer team in Berlin. Lehman then blocked the two shots to give Germany its ticket to the semifinals.

"There's a lot of speculation, but at the end of the day [the note] could have been blank," says Andreas Herren, head of the International Football (Soccer) Federation (FIFA), on the telephone from Germany. "As a former goalkeeper, I can say it's always a mental game."

Mr. Ginsburg says that as a sports psychologist he tries to help players avoid the creeping sensation of defeat. "We try to break the last-minute shot into the present, not what happened last year." He asks players to follow preshot rituals. "I ask them: Do you take a certain number of breaths? Do you tie your shoelaces? It's like putting in golfing. Golfers have routines each time. It's just that in this case, you have to be able to react to the goalie."

Ginsburg compares England's shootout losses with the 86-year World Series drought endured by the Boston Red Sox. Each loss, he says, spurs a "self-fulfilling prophecy" both for the fans and the players.

But Mark Hooper, spokesman for the English Football Association (FA), says that England is not demoralized by the loss its national squad suffered. The trouble the team faces is training players to shoot a penalty in front of a crowd. "With our youth teams, we have certainly done more training," he says. "But it's impossible to replicate the environment because you are training in an [empty] field. And in a stadium you have thousands of fans watching you take the shot," he says in a phone interview.

Ginsburg suggests playing games once a week, where a large crowd will gather and try to distract the player as he takes the shot.

But some fans are not convinced that penalty shooting is something you can teach.

"Maybe you can teach half of it," says Sandor Hajnal, a retired semiprofessional soccer player from Hungary who has coached youth soccer in the US. "But the other half is all in the player and how he deals with pressure."

Hector Noriega, a Salvadoran soccer fan and manager of a Greek restaurant in Boston, says there's no telling what will make the difference. He recalls hearing the same words, again and again, at every pickup soccer game he played after the 1994 World Cup final: "Hey, if Baggio missed it, why not us?"

Page: 1 | 2