{"id":15713,"date":"2012-06-28T09:16:23","date_gmt":"2012-06-28T14:16:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=15713"},"modified":"2013-02-07T12:15:38","modified_gmt":"2013-02-07T17:15:38","slug":"duleep-allirajah-penalties-again-jesus-its-like-bloody-groundhog-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/06\/28\/duleep-allirajah-penalties-again-jesus-its-like-bloody-groundhog-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Duleep Allirajah: “Penalties. Again. Jesus, it\u2019s like bloody Groundhog Day<\/em>.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

More cogitation on England’s inglorious record<\/a> of penalty kick performance:<\/p>\n

Why do England always lose on penalties? It\u2019s like one of those big ontological questions which children ask — like \u2018Why is the sky blue?\u2019 — which invariably stump parents. These are self-evident truths, but we struggle to explain them. The players practice spot-kicks regularly. The goalkeepers meticulously study the penalty traits of their opponents. And yet we always, always bottle it. Why? Roy Hodgson was at a loss to explain what went wrong. \u2018I don\u2019t know how to answer why we cannot win penalties shootouts. It can go either way. It is a difficult one. Anyone can win\u2019, he said. \u2018I think penalties is always down to luck. It is a lottery. It is just the way it goes in football.\u2019<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an old clich\u00e9 that penalties are a lottery. It also happens to be nonsense, as I\u2019ve argued before. Sure, luck plays a part. But, ultimately, penalty shootouts are tests of psychological strength. They are won and lost in the mind. It\u2019s all about keeping focused, banishing the doubts and holding one\u2019s nerve under extreme pressure. Easier said than done, of course, but successive penalty shootout defeats are imprinted on our sporting psyche. The inevitability of failure has become a myth that all of us — footballers included — have come to believe. Did you see the terror in Ashley Young\u2019s face as he was about to take his ill-fated kick? The ghosts of all those missed penalties had returned to haunt him.<\/p>\n

Invariably, a motley crew of psychologists, positive-thinking gurus and snake-oil sellers will be forming a queue outside FA headquarters, offering cures for the English penalty curse. I think there\u2019s a simpler solution. Let\u2019s campaign for spot kicks to be scrapped. We should use whatever arguments we think might work. I\u2019d play the inclusion card. Penalty kicks clearly discriminate against the mentally frail. The English, who suffer from a collective, penalty-induced trauma, will always get a raw deal. How can that be fair? If FIFA wants a truly level playing field, the answer is to get rid of the pseudo-lottery of spot kicks. What we need is a proper lottery. We don\u2019t want skill or nerve to play any part. Tossing a coin, rolling dice, drawing straws, a game of scissor-paper-stone — anything is better than a shootout. Come on Mr Blatter, give us chokers a chance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

More cogitation on England’s inglorious record of penalty kick performance: Why do England always lose on penalties? It\u2019s like one of those big ontological questions which children ask — like \u2018Why is the sky blue?\u2019 — which invariably stump parents. These are self-evident truths, but we struggle to explain them. The players practice spot-kicks regularly. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,62,20],"tags":[570,156,882,139],"class_list":["post-15713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-europe","category-soccer","tag-england","tag-fail","tag-fifa","tag-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-45r","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15713"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18944,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15713\/revisions\/18944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}