Jordet, in his stimulating book Pressure: Lessons From The Psychology Of The Penalty Shoot Out says that anxiety is normal and should be embraced.  Greater openness round mental wellbeing is allowing the modern professional to admit this.  Erling Haarland, one of the world’s most accomplished goal scorers, has shared the fear he regularly feels round taking a penalty; it is hard to imagine a player from the 1970s saying the same. 

Missing a penalty in the shootout is inevitable; the only way it can conclude.  And statistics show that the world’s greatest players, like Lionel Messi, are not notably better at converting penalties than others.  On average, the best players have around an eighty percent success rate (which, significantly, is one missed penalty out of five in a shootout).  As in other professions, the best results are achieved by creating systems and cultures that can adapt quickly and honestly to errors and learn from them without humiliating those who fail. 

Reading the book cast my mind back to the archetypal shootout between David and Goliath.  Deciding war between opposing tribes based on an individual contest was quite common in the ancient world – effectively moving to the penalty shootout before the game, to save the effort.  Perhaps David should have lost it, and not just because of his size.  Beforehand, he had a serious bust up with his side and those who did not see him as a team player.  Then Goliath trash talked him like Emi Martinez is famed for with Aston Villa and Argentina.  And finally, he ran up to take his shot very quickly, without much reflection.  But then again, Geir Jordet would be the first to point out that preparing badly for a contest does not mean you can’t win it – just that you are less likely to. 

Football is a global language and the penalty shootout is like the cataclysmic end to a Shakespearian tragedy.  English fans are long suffering audiences of this trauma – from Italia 90 to Wembley 2021, via the 1996 Euros when football was coming home until a last minute wrong turning.  But many other nations have under-achieved at penalties, like Holland and Spain and, more recently, France.  Roberto Baggio of Italy missed the decisive penalty in the first World Cup Final to go to penalties in 1994.  He says of it:  

‘I failed that time.  Period.  And it affected me for years.  It was the worst moment of my career.  I still dream about it.’.   

The personal stakes are as high, if not higher, than the nation’s.   

We are left with the feeling that hugely divergent outcomes can emerge from the smallest and most random of causes.  The human tendency is then to rationalise the outcome in ways that make it seem inevitable.  Geir Jordet is aware of this in football, but in other walks of life, we continue to build up wobbly cases on shallow evidence as a way of warding off anxiety or the fear that others will think we are clueless if we admit to the existence of chance.  Most people are right less than eighty percent of the time; something we might hold in mind when the next England players make that solitary walk to the penalty spot.