WARSAW, POLAND—Race car drivers follow a simple rule to help avoid running into crashes that happen ahead of them on the track.
When a driver sees two cars collide, he is instructed to point his nose directly toward the accident. The physics assumption at work is that inertia may carry either car in any direction, but it cannot hold them in the same spot.
If you head for the crash, it will be elsewhere by the time you arrive.
The same principle holds in the taking of football penalties. No ’keeper ever stands still as the shot is taken — not because it’s a bad idea (considered arithmetically, the ball is just as likely to hit you as it is either corner), but because you look especially stupid if you don’t.
A ball knocked where the keeper is, but soon won’t be, works more often than not.
It’s done very seldom and only by a certain sort of player — one whose reputation is already so enormous that he won’t look idiotic if it blows up on him.
France’s Zinedine Zidane chipped one past Italy’s Gianluigi Buffon in the final of World Cup 2006. It worked, but only just. Zidane’s overbaked softball struck the crossbar, ricocheted in a few inches over the line and bounced back out again. Even the best have trouble resisting the temptation to hammer it.
Andrea Pirlo’s effort on Sunday against England — already one of the most famous shots in history — was the example par excellence. He jogged up. There was no follow through. Italy’s Pirlo only gave it a nudge with his instep. It didn’t rise more than four feet off the ground. While English ’keeper Joe Hart was already sliding to the right on his back, the ball was still several feet short of the net.
Later, Pirlo suggested that his choice was made on the spur of the moment.
“I saw that the goalkeeper was really fired up . . . ” — That’s putting it mildly. Hart was working hard to psych himself out of the moment, hopping around, grinning like a maniac and doing some of sort Haka variation with his tongue — “. . . It was easier to shoot that way and it put a bit of pressure on the keeper.”
In Italy, they call this balloon shot il cucchiaio — the spoon. Everywhere else, it’s called a Panenka.
Amazingly, no one at the highest levels had ever tried it before Czech legend Antonin Panenka carved his name in legend with it.
It was the final of Euro 1976. Czechoslovakia versus their good pals, West Germany. The game ended 2-2. For the first time in tournament history, penalties would resolve the matter. Panenka had the decisive shot. The cheek of his effort stunned world football.
The legendary Pele would later say that a man who would take such a shot was either a genius or a madman, missing the fact that most of the former are that way in part because they are slightly the latter.
Panenka’s discovery, if it can be called that, was born on the practice ground of his club side, Bohemians. He and the goalkeeper would take friendly bets over how many penalties could be stopped. The stakes were chocolate or beer (luxury items, one imagines, in 1970s Prague). Panenka regularly lost.
He puzzled over the issue and arrived at the race-car driver’s solution — a soft shot that allows the keeper time to move out of the way.
“The only problem,” Panenka would say later, “was that I started getting a lot fatter because I won back all those beers and chocolates.”
Imagine the courage it took to unveil that training-ground Eureka at that moment. Considering that it was a decision taken in repose, rather than in the heat of battle, it may be the single bravest choice in sports history.
The only curiosity is why it is still so rare. In a limited sample size, it works far more often than it fails — which is more than you can say for every other sort of penalty tactic.
The answer has nothing to do with skill. Anyone can Panenka. The answer is courage. No one will ever laugh at you for blasting it well wide.
Penalties add another layer of drama, but they are also a great sifter that separates out special players. Not in terms of skill. But in terms of those so committed to winning, they are willing to risk looking the fool in order to do so.
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