Penalties: Team v Individual

One of the most remarkable aspects of the current penalty shoot-out set-up is the way it transforms what has been up to that point a team game into an individual event. What’s more, it’s an individual event with perhaps the highest stakes in any sport.

When your turn comes to step forward, you leave the team group behind on the halfway line, and make your way up alone. You get only one shot, unless you’re Jamie Carragher, and that one shot has - on recent experience - at least a fifty percent chance of deciding not only your fate, but your team’s, and perhaps your country’s too.

Is there another event like it? A 100m sprint final takes less long, but you aren’t doing it alone. Jumpers and throwers act alone, but have several attempts to show what they can do. Darts and snooker are lonely sports, but you have time to compose yourself. Taking a penalty gives you time only to experience apprehension and fear.

It all leads up to an event of unparalleled tension and drama. There is nothing like it elsewhere in sport. Not even banned sports could match it: at least in a duel your opponent was in the same fix as yourself.

Perhaps it’s too exciting to change, but if it were to be changed, this idea might be one to consider.

Each team nominates three players who will take all of their penalties. These three players are allowed to approach the penalty area together, as company for each other, but are not permitted to be in the line of sight of the opposing goalkeeper during kicks.

Each team takes three penalties. At the end of the three, the team who have scored the most of theirs are considered to have won the first set. There are two more sets, of the same kind, and best of three wins. If all three sets are drawn, which is highly unlikely, then the team leading after five sets wins. Or after seven, or after nine.. but that’s not going to happen.

What this means is that matches are decided quickly, in a reasonably exciting way, but in a team situation. The players know that if they miss one kick, it isn’t necessarily the end of the world. They will have the chance to redeem themselves shortly. Nor are they acting alone.

It’s a team ending, for a team game. It would make for a fairer reflection of the talents of the two teams. It would be - don’t you agree? - trainable for. And there’s always the chance of an highly televisual psychological collapse by one of the players..

But it wouldn’t be quite the same:

Penalties In Nature

Thanks to Harry Rutherford of Heraclitean Fire for pointing out this article in Nature.

Harry didn’t let on what he made of it. I suspect he was being polite, because this is academic psychology at its worst.

Let’s start with this:

On a summer evening last year, more than a billion pairs of eyes were fixed on footballer David Trézéguet as he stepped up to take his penalty for France in the shootout against Italy to decide the world championship. A supremely talented goal-scorer, he inexplicably crashed his kick against the crossbar. France lost.

Fast-forward six months, and psychologists say they have explained why: the pressure got to him.

Well, yes…

Their results indicate that the psychological burden of a penalty shootout is the most important factor in whether or not a player scores — more so than skill, fatigue or experience, which are so crucial in other areas of the game.

That’s the reason why some of the world’s most gifted players have come a cropper in this pressure-cooker situation, says Geir Jordet, a sports psychologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and a member of the research team. “Players prepare for the physical aspects but not the psychological aspects,” he says.

Of course, that is true, and that’s the point, but it’s no more than Clive Woodward has been saying for years - and it’s no more than messrs. Hoddle and Ericksson have been debating for even longer. Woodward says that you can prepare for the pressure of penalties - Hoddle and Ericksson say no, you can’t.

Some players and coaches still believe that a penalty shootout is a ‘lottery’, with luck playing the largest role in deciding the outcome. But this view is counterproductive, Jordet argues. The worst thing for a player’s psychological position is to believe that a miss on their part would have disastrous consequences, and that they have no control over the situation.

In another study2, Jordet and his team interviewed professional footballers from the Netherlands and Sweden, and found that subscribers to the lottery view were more likely to miss than were those who were confident and believed that their destiny was in their own hands.

We already know this. These are basic cognitive psychological principles - and, not to forget, exactly what most fans and commentators say about the scenario. Confident player score more penalties. But what do you suggest we do about it?

And in terms of what to do about it, this just isn’t good enough:

Jordet suggests that players should rehearse the entire routine, including the lonely walk from the centre circle to take their kick. He also thinks that the media could publish details of players’ practice shootouts, to raise the pressure even during training.

He also stresses that players should have a fixed routine to block out thoughts of failure, similar to that used by rugby’s Jonny Wilkinson, who kicked England to World Cup victory in 2003.

Most recently, Jordet’s team has discovered that players who pause for less than half a second before beginning their run-up succeed only 63% of the time, whereas those who compose themselves for longer enjoy an 81% success rate. This hints at the importance of a solid routine to calm the nerves, they say.

Quite apart from anything else, that’s an utter parody of what Jonny Wilkinson does. You can’t “block out thoughts of failure”. You can’t. How do you do it? A routine isn’t going to do it. Have you ever had a routine block out negative thoughts? Of course not. This reminds me of the bizarre idea I see psychologists putting out about Tiger Woods - that he “forgets” about a bad shot; that he can induce some deliberate form of amnesia in order to stop a bad shot affecting the next one. No, he doesn’t. Show me that happening in a brain scanner. However, I think I know what he does in those situations, and I’ll talk about it in my next post - I think it’s something Alan Shearer does too, and it’s something that can be learnt without having to resort to nonsense psychology or superstition.

Time, I think, for me to present the last part of my series on how to take penalties. It isn’t exactly soundbite material, but the actual do-this part is straightforward enough. I’m going to have to do it as a podcast, however, as enough material is being lifted from this site and passed off as other people’s thinking. They’re not having this.

Bray and Kerwin on Penalties

In comments, I referred to Dr. Ken Bray’s book, How To Score: Science and the Beautiful Game. Warmly recommended - even the relatively weak chapter on psychology, which at least gets beyond the English obsession with “motivation” and “inspiration”, and gives you a good idea of what it was Erickson was trying to achieve and why it might have gone wrong in the end.
Here is a summary of his and David Kerwin’s excellent breakdown of the physical penalty kick, complete with diagram.

Taking Penalties - Part Three

In the second part of this series, we looked at a couple of examples of the way a film director can make choices about the presentation of a scene in order to elicit predictable emotional responses from a film’s audience. That these responses are actually predictable tells us something about how the human mind applies value to everything it receives from the senses. The mind takes in sensory input from an enormous range of different physical locations in the body, and synthesises it all to give the impression of a single integrated personality, something still entirely mysterious in neurological terms.

(Readers of Ian MacEwan’s excellent Saturday pick up quite a lot of contemporary neurological thinking, but it’s easy to go too far with the confident “this experience is the consequence of activity in this part of the brain” pronouncements which litter the book. We’ve been able to measure glucose consumption in different parts of the brain under various conditions and during various activities - it would be a step too far at this stage to read everything into glucose consumption that is correlative to these situations and activities, as we don’t yet know to what degree correlation and causation coincide.)

Anyone reading sports psychology will come up against “visualisation” almost immediately. Visualisation is the use of internal mental representations of sporting situations to do three main things: train, prepare, and pre-programme victory. Mentally rehearsing a repetitive activity has been shown to be very effective, perhaps almost as effective as real physical practice of it. (At least once you’ve learned the technique you are going to practice. I wouldn’t try to learn golf from scratch purely in the head). Top British athletes are taught to “visualise” their races over and over, running through every possible eventuality, until they are confident that nothing is going to happen that they aren’t ready to cope with. By always seeing themselves as winning through, they raise their own expectations and thus their performance. In practice, a lot more complicated..

The trouble with visualisation is that it assumes our internal mental representations are in the same class of experience as cinema or television. I doubt this. Cinema or television are the closest useful comparisons that can be made, but there are important differences between simile and reality. A few moments comparing your memories of watching “Casablanca” whilst actually watching “Casablanca” shows that. Internal mental representations are muddier, darker, more elusive, deeply selective, stranger in every way, than a passage of film or a photograph.

Some people, not realising that it’s like this for everyone, say that they can’t “visualise”. They imagine that everyone else is having the full HD widescreen surround-sound experience while they are stuck with their own dulled, reluctant, fade-out smog. (Just for the sake of completeness, my guess is that those with a strong visual memory - certain artists, savants like Stephen Wiltshire, chess players and the like - are no different: I suspect that their advantage comes from elsewhere.) Some neurologists theorise that the shifty, muddy, slightly surreal nature of internal mental representations prevents us from mistaking them for sensory experience - from perpetual hallucination, in other words. (Actual hallucination is another question for another day).
Compared with cinema, the mind has a far wider repertoire of ways to express value. Film directors employ only a few - those that can be roughly translated onto screen. The others are far harder to pin down.

Some years ago, when I was still working out of a practice in Oxfordshire, I spent some time helping a young man whose career was being held back by his endless procrastination. At one point, acting on a hunch, I asked him to describe, in director’s terms if you like, his internal mental representation of someone he liked and felt positive towards. His description tallied fairly closely with this picture:

It’s a Singer Sargent, of course, but what’s of interest are the directorial features of it. The colours are warm; the figure is seen whole; there’s a certain depth of field, a sense of 3 dimensions, a sense of movement, and that movement elegant and smooth. We’re looking at the figure from slightly below her.
I then asked him to picture himself, mentally. This he found far harder. After persistent questioning about what he was representing himself as, he described something very similar to this picture: (again, click to enlarge).

It’s a Francis Bacon - a painter I suspect of having a very good idea of the kind of thing I’m discussing here. Poor David Sylvester: how much he loved Bacon, and what lies Bacon fed him. Still. Notice the absence of a complete figure -and the distorted, twisted, writhing form that is present there. We’re looking straight at it - there’s no depth, and we’re quite close to it. The colours aren’t cold or unharmonious - but they’re disturbing nonetheless. My client’s description also included limbs - but incoherently positioned, confused, separate from the body and tangled as though the whole of him had been tossed like a rag doll.

Little by little, I got him to change the directorial features of his self-representation to match those of the person he liked. It was slow going at first. Then, all at once, it fell into place - and he sat up in his chair, suddenly energised, looking at the backs of his hands as though seeing them for the first time (I find people have a habit of doing that when treatment is starting to get somewhere). He was feeling terrific - without really knowing why.
Of course, a short while later, the emotions that lay behind the first self-representation soon restored the status quo ante. But the whole experience got me thinking.

Anyone familiar with NLP will notice that what we’ve done here is essentially a sophisticated version of a “submodalites” exercise. I suspect that the NLP founders did indeed stumble across something interesting in submodalities, but I don’t think they’ve done very much with it. For one thing, I’ve never seen it used in quite this way - the film/photograph simile is used without awareness of its limits and what those limits reveal. The Bacon painting is no photo - or if it is, it has more in common with surrealism or ethnic art. And that takes us towards Jung and Freud, not Bandler. Nor are the NLPers terribly interested in the emotion that drives internal representations - emotion that means we can’t just substitute one representation for one that feels better but is out of kilter with our overall emotional weather. So much for that, anyway.

Since the World Cup, I’ve talked to dozens of people about their own internal mental representations of themselves. That’s not a large sample. And this is entirely subjective, given that we can’t actually see into someone else’s mind to check the accuracy of their self-reporting. But the answers are consistent. Feelings of low self-worth directly accompany an inability to internally represent the self as a coherent human being. Feelings of low self-worth are Bacon. Feelings of being in control, being calm, content, relaxed etc. are Sargent.

But what’s more interesting in this context is what happens when you take someone who is Sargent and put them in a situation they are less sure they can handle. Take your big confident roaring boy away from his mates and put him in front of a hostile interview panel. Take your postdoctorate seminar star out into New Bond Street and ask him to approach strange women for a date. I’m finding that Sargent begins to break up into a version of Bacon. The coherent figure becomes surreally incoherent: the colours change, the depth of field changes, the limbs begin to blur and writhe, all while that person’s sense of ease and capability erode away.

This change - if I’m right - is quite obviously emotionally led. That does seem to be the order in which things happen - emotion (as an external expression) precedes conscious inner feeling, which precedes intellectual consideration. (Paul Ekman makes for interesting reading if you’re interested).

In essence, the nature of someone’s internal representation of themselves changes to fit their situation. The better they are feeling in a given situation, the more coherent their internal self-representation. They’ll be more Sargent, and less Bacon.

(Aside: this also seems to work with our internal representations of people we know only through photographs. The way I represent Nelson Mandela, say, is quite different from the way I represent e.g. Vladimir Putin, for all that the way I’ve experienced both men is via the same kind of news coverage. The same goes for two people I’ve only ever seen via mugshots - Fred West is quite different, to me, from Harold Shipman.)

It doesn’t seem to make a real difference whether or not someone is used to seeing their own photograph. (People who voluntarily allow themselves to be photographed often and enjoy it seem, however, to have more robust coherent self-representations). “Bacon” type people are apt to find it hard to remember what photographs of themselves look like, and interpret photographs of themselves differently from other people who are looking at the same print.

What I’m getting at is this. In a penalty shoot-out situation, we see top players, accustomed to performing under pressure, in front of huge, demanding crowds, go to bits. The body language collapses, the head drops, and the ball gets blasted over the bar. Or lobbed weakly into the arms of the keeper. Or it swings wide. Rarely do you see someone whose bottle is gone score, even through luck or accident. What I’m suggesting is that, in the context of penalties, a player’s normally coherent internal self-representation has corroded - it’s gone from Sargent, or their equivalent of Sargent, to Bacon.

If I’m right, and all my experiments since the World Cup suggest that I’m not far off track, then there’s something we can do about it. That something will be the subject of the next article in the series.

N.B. I’m just using Sargent and Bacon as vivid examples - they’re just to give a feel, a sense of the basic idea. It’s worth bearing in mind that these examples suffer from the same weaknesses as the film/photography simile.

Taking Penalties - Part Two

I promise to get around to some actual football sooner or later in this series, but first, films.

And two scenes in particular.

Casablanca: Rick, drunk, listens to Sam, concerned and sober, playing “As Time Goes By” (you must have seen it). The scene is filmed in a warm monochrome, the sound is slow and lugubrious - it’s a love scene, without a love object. Sam and Rick are seen from close to, their faces taking up most of the frame. Behind them, you won’t see much depth of field. The room is in shadow, but these are soft, pillowy shadows, not the stark knife-edges thrown down by an interrogation lamp.

Star Wars: the toe-curling medal ceremony. We watch from high above, in conditions of stark, white light. The music is brassy, quick, urgent (and embarrassing, let’s admit). There’s huge depth of field, and in it, hundreds of people, all seen complete from head to toe. The focus is sharp, the colours stark but not cold. Everyone moves, when they move, quickly, but not smoothly - it’s a nervous and jerking kind of movement.

Casablanca was filmed in black and white as a result of deliberate decision.

Two scenes, then, both of which you are likely to have sat through at one time or another. Pushing to one side the traditional, and by now, thoroughly tedious blogger’s/blog reader’s cynicism and refusal to admit to reacting in predictable fashion - neither scenes directorial characteristics were chosen at random. And you could, of course, swap them around. The Star Wars medal ceremony could be filmed in warm monochrome, and the camera could zoom in on, say, the faces of Han and Luke; the soundtrack could be slowed and warmed, the background blurred out to reduce the depth of focus, the characters’ movements paced more gently and more easily. Likewise, Casablanca could have held that Rick/Sam scene in colour, with strong contrast instead of melting greys, the song could have been played at a higher tempo, and the camera drawn back to show Rick and Sam from head to foot in a larger room with a greater depth of focus.

Without changing the actors’ lines or performances in any way at all, you could transform the impact of either scene upon its audience just by making these few changes.

And you could predict how the impact would change. As the scenes were actually filmed, Casablanca is melancholy, reflective, complex and contemplative. Star Wars has such moments, but the medal scene is all triumph, brashness, energy and inevitability. (Is it the worst scene in the film? I think it might be..) As the scenes were actually filmed, that is how most audiences react - that’s how they feel: that’s how the director meant them to feel at that point, and the manner in which the scenes were filmed was specifically planned and chosen in order to provoke those feelings.

In films, the camera work, soundtrack, colour balance, storyboarding etc. are all intended to create a series of predictable emotional reactions in the audience. The sole reason that the audiences’ reaction can be predicted in some way is that we are, for the most part, emotionally alike: our minds respond to the same stimuli with the same inner feelings and outward emotion.
Presenting scenes in this manner provokes reactions in terms of feeling and emotion purely because that manner of presentation corresponds, in some way, to how the human mind interacts with stimuli. Consistently reacts, or else the whole exercise is pointless.

I’m going to leave it there today. Summary: directorial choices are made on the realistic basis that certain ways of presenting scenes produce predictable feelings and emotion in the audience. Have you noticed that neither Sky Sports or the BBC favour the wide-angle view of matches anything like as much as continental broadcasters? There’s a reason for that - which I might come to - which has a lot to do with the differences between, not just British and continental broadcasting, but the differences between British and continental written reporting of the game.

Taking Penalties: Part One

The English might be grateful to Sepp Blatter for threatening the end of the penalty shoot out. It’s been our downfall on five separate occasions, and in each case bar 1998, victory would have left a tournament open at our feet. Since watching the last episode in this sequence, I’ve been working on a mix of old and new ideas in the search for a solution. It’s time for me to roll out what I’ve come up with. The question is, what happens when an otherwise confident, talented player crumbles under the pressure of a shoot-out (or other such situation) - can we define what is going on in a way that we can use to offset that crumbling and give the player the mental space he needs to succeed in his difficult task?
Most of what you’ll read about this is simply question-begging. Simply to say that one player is “more confident” in such situations gets us absolutely nowhere. It tells us nothing, gives us nothing we can use. And to follow that up with saying that it’s impossible to legislate for penalties, that there’s no effective way to prepare for them, is less a professional viewpoint than a counsel of despair. It reflects only the English professional’s willingness to do any strange form of physical exercise available, to attempt any crank diet, to take on any kind of performance supplement yet rear up in horror at the merest hint of psychology.
A combination of research and my own subjective clinical experience have led me to believe as follows:

• I know, specifically, what is happening to players as they approach penalties, or other high-pressure moments. What’s happening with players who crumble and players who remain cool can be rationally differentiated, and is reasonably consistent and predictable.
• I have a specific set of techniques that, if applied, will give a player infinitely more emotional control over himself in those pressure moments, and, if he/she chooses, at other times.

I’m going to go through this in a series of posts, step by step, but for today, I’m going to satisfy myself with a couple of short extracts that might give a hint as to where this is going.

The first comes from chapter seven of Antonio Damasio’s pioneering book on the relationship between emotion and cognition, Decartes’ Error, published in 1994. He’s talking about feelings and the physical body:

..(What makes feelings) different is that they are first and foremost about the body, that they offer us the cognition of our visceral and musculoskeletal state as it becomes affected by preorganised mechanisms and by the cognitive structures we have developed under their influence. Feelings let us mind the body, attentively, as during an emotional state, or faintly, as during a background state. They let us mind the body “live”. when they give us perceptual images of the body, or “by rebroadcast,” when they give us recalled images of the body state appropriate to certain circumstances, in “as if” feelings.

Feelings offer us a glimpse of what goes on in our flesh, as a momentary image of that flesh is juxtaposed to the images of other objects and situations; in so doing, feelings modify our comprehensive notion of those other objects and situations. By dint of juxtaposition, body images give to other images a quality of goodness or badness, of pleasure or pain.

Essentially, the brain collates nerve impulses etc. to create a coherent internal mental representation of the current state of the body. The brain can also summon up coherent mental representations of the past state of the body, and the potential state of the body in imagined scenarios. Implicit in this is the way the brain ascribes a value to objects, situations, and indeed the body itself.

I’ll be coming back to this, in particular, in later posts, but first here’s former England captain David Platt on the topic of former England captain Alan Shearer, taken from Grout and Perrin’s entertaining book Mind Games:

When Alan misses a chance he just “blows” it away. He breathes and it is gone. He sniffs up his nose and that is his way of saying it’s gone. He just moves on from there thinking he’ll get another chance, he’ll get another goal.

That image is perhaps better after breakfast, but it is significant, and I’ll be elaborating on why in future posts.

Replacing Penalties

Sepp Blatter has tired of penalty shoot-outs at World Cup Finals, and wants to replace them with.. well, he doesn’t really know. Counting corners, taking players off one by one during extra time, just playing on until someone scores - like a lot of us, Blatter senses that there’s something cheap and unsatisfactory about penalties, yet coming up with an alternative that isn’t actually worse is extremely difficult.

Penalty shoot-outs are a product of the 1970s. If you didn’t know that before, I doubt you’d be surprised to hear it. They’re a German idea, allegedly sprung from the fertile brain of Kurt Wald (although claims are made for the Israeli Yosof Dagan too). Back then, they were a replacement for a simple drawing of lots, and at first, one team took all of its initial five kicks before the other team took theirs, the shoot-out ending when the winner became obvious.

I’ve spent a lot of time since England’s World Cup exit mulling over why it is that we are so poor at penalties, and it’s just my kind of luck that they look likely to be pulled just when I think I’ve come up with a relatively foolproof way of preparing for them. Thank heavens the same methods work for golf. But there’s hope yet. The alternatives to penalties are all worse.

The principle weakness of the penalty shootout is that it encourages weak teams to defend with ten men behind the ball in the hope of fluking a passage against superior opposition. Or, two unadventurous teams can come to a silent compact on the pitch, and put all of their faith in the shootout. The dire match between Switzerland and the Ukraine epitomised the latter: no one who was there will ever forget the way they can’t remember a single incident from the game. It’s probably also worth saying that shootouts can accidentally reward the wrong team. I don’t really think that’s ever been England’s fate - but I do feel sorry for Spain over England’s penalty victory over them in Euro ‘96: Spain were by far the better side on the day, and had a perfectly good goal disallowed before succumbing to David Seaman when extra time failed to find them a winner.

All that is better than drawing lots, of course. It’s been said many times, and it’s still true, that penalties at least allow the players themselves to decide matters. What about some of the other ideas?

One that is often put forward is a kind of penalty-max. The attacker is one on one with the goalkeeper, but has to begin his approach to goal with the ball at his feet from the centre circle. From there, he can beat the keeper in any way he chooses. I’d enjoy watching Alonso or Beckham try this in their own inimitable style.. Obviously, this would be more time consuming than simply taking a penalty kick, and there are other complications. What happens if the goalkeeper fouls the attacker - especially if the foul takes place outside the area? How long do you give the attacker - he can’t roam the field all day plucking up courage. Of course, if this method were to be adopted, the pratfalls committed by terrified attackers in the glare of the world’s gaze would make for some wonderful and eternal footage. But the trauma would be unfair on the worst of players; missing a penalty is one thing - we’ve seen the worst of that, in Beckham’s slip against Portugal in 2004 - what players might have to recover from under this new system just beggars the imagination. What’s more, it would bring the seriousness of the occasion into disrepute.

Counting corners is another favourite idea. The team who have won the most corners over ninety minutes and extra time win the match. No need for penalties, and allegedly the result would reflect the balance of the game. But it wouldn’t, of course: a Mourinho or some similarly tactically-literate coach would soon be on top of the new situation, and that coach’s team would straightaway be generating corners to excess and in the most unusual ways. Top matches would begin to resemble croquet or bar billiards. It would mean the renaissance of the old-fashioned English centre-forward as teams sought a Geoff Hurst or an Alan Shearer to meet all of those corners, but is that really what you want to pay to watch?

Of course, the teams could just play on until someone scores - changing ends every twenty minutes. The golden goal, in fact. I must admit to missing the “silver goal”, where a team scoring without reply in the first half of extra time won the game, and the “golden goal” itself, if it came, was a moment of huge emotion and drama, the footballing equivalent of the destruction of the Death Star. But we’ve only ever had the “golden goal” in situations where, should it not come, penalties are still sitting just over the horizon. If the “golden goal” applied in a penalty-less situation, then the problems that would present are actually quite severe. Cast your mind back to England’s game with Brazil in Japan in 2002: how long are you going to ask players to continue in those hot, humid conditions? And even in bearable temperatures, how long can players continue without actually losing the physical energy necessary to get up the pitch and score? Will a tournament be distorted by the exhaustion of the winning team spilling over into later rounds? Will players be left on the field carrying injuries - and do themselves lasting damage as a result? Games like this might very well suffer a kind of heat death, as two listless sides pass the ball between themselves, all passion spent, just longing for the whole thing to be over.

What about the idea where each team begins to withdraw players one by one as extra time progresses, opening the game up, until one team scores? Again, it sounds good in principle. But the problem of just playing on and on until a goal is scored - exhaustion, and its effect on later rounds of a tournament or indeed a player’s later career - is magnified here. Players who are already tired are going to be asked to cover more and more of the pitch. One team may be carrying more injuries than the other, and are going to be disproportionately disadvantaged. What’s more, knowing what’s in the offing, teams are going to start conserving their energy earlier in the game, meaning that matches will slow down. Teams will save themselves for the moment when the balance of their opponents’ side is disrupted by a withdrawal - and everyone in the stadium or at home will be forced to watch them saving themselves. And anyway, I can’t be the only one who thinks that this method just feels wrong.

Counting shots on goal? No, see counting corners. Some of the best teams make fewer attempts than their opponents - but craft better chances.

For all the disasters they’ve brought upon England - and they really intrude on the national consciousness these days - penalties still seem to be the only workable solution to a tied match in a knock-out tournament. Unless you want to try St George’s luck with a toss of the coin. No. From England’s point of view, the only option is to take Sir Clive Woodward’s advice. We have to stop throwing up our hands and bemoaning the impossibility of preparing for penalties in any real way, and make taking the blasted things (blasted in the Shearer sense, I hope, not in the Waddle) under crowd and situation pressure a part of our Saturday and Sunday afternoons, our weekday evenings. A national, season-long penalty competition. Private practice but under severe psychological pressure (the Army might be able to supply some ideas - I notice that they don’t take the attitude that you can’t prepare a man for combat). All this would require a spectacular change in attitude from the players especially. At present, they’re likely to make fun of all of this. And of course, if they’d rather, if we’d rather, have a giggle now and the long failure trudge back to some dressing room as another World Cup or European Championship goes the same way.. well, we all have to respect that. Don’t we?