When Theo Hernández brought down Mason Mount in the box, with France winning 2-1 over England, the obvious choice to take the penalty looked like Harry Kane. The captain, and one of the best pitchers in history. At that minute, 84 accredited a correctness of 86.9%, when the general average is 76%. Between Tottenham and the English team, and not counting the tiebreakers, he had shot 61 times from eleven meters, and had hit 53. The last time, just half an hour earlier, when he had equalized the match (1-1 ). But this time he failed. It was the best idea, but it was also the worst idea for him to shoot twice in a row, and especially for Hugo Lloris, a teammate at Tottenham. And Gareth Southgate knew it.
The England coach has spent years meticulously preparing penalties, particularly those for shoot-outs, a fate in which his mistake left England without the Euro 1996 final and haunted him for decades like a caricature. When he took over the selection, he sought to disassemble that devilish machine to examine it in detail and successfully reassemble it. The English federation hired experts such as the Spanish economist Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, who has analyzed thousands of pitches and has advised clubs and teams around the world. They also worked with psychologists on how to execute each step before the shot, from who hands the shooter the ball to what to do when the referee whistles, how long to wait and how to breathe. Throughout the last Euro Cup they performed hundreds of repetitions of the ritual, with the whistle included. But they lost the final in the shootout against Italy.
Upon arriving in Qatar, they introduced a modification that gave clues about the inconvenience of Kane shooting Lloris twice. The first days they practiced without a goalkeeper. In its place they placed a net with holes in the corners. Ramsdale, the second goalkeeper, explained that it was about not playing mind games: “It can be harmful to shoot with goalkeepers, because we start to know where they shoot from,” he said. “If I know where you’re going to shoot 7 out of 10 times, and I start cheating and going a little early, and I start parrying them, you might start to worry.”
After almost 10 years together at Tottenham, there is no goalkeeper in the world who knows Kane better than Lloris, and there is no goalkeeper the English captain has watched more than his opponent on Saturday at Al Bayt.
If any penalty is already a small mental war fueled by the data that footballers receive, a shot between two acquaintances borders on torture. It is the moment of soccer that is most similar to the solitary clash of tennis. in the documentary Breaking Point, Andy Roddick and Mardy Fish told a similar story. The two American tennis players trained in the same federation intensive program and then lived and trained together for months at the Roddicks’ home. They knew each other in detail, and they met in the final in Cincinnati, with a match point for Fish and Roddick serving: “Mardy knew I wanted to go for his drive, because that serve had worked for me against him a thousand times ”. Fish was aware: “He knows that my drive it’s worse, so it’s probably going to take out my drive. But, wait, he knows that I know that, so he’s probably going to throw me out backwards. No, I’m sure he’s not going to go for my backhand. Wait a minute… He must know that I know that…”. Roddick took him backwards, Fish didn’t arrive and Roddick ended up taking the tournament.
Under normal conditions, a second penalty to the same goalkeeper in a match does not affect the shooter too much. According to Opta data from the last five seasons in the five major European leagues, when a footballer shoots again after having already scored from eleven meters, he hits 84.3% of the time, in line with the figures for the best pitchers, who are usually the ones who repeat in these competitions.
But Southgate knew this was not a normal matchup, as he said after the game: “It’s very difficult when you have a second penalty and the goalkeeper knows you very well.”
Less than two months earlier, on October 12, Kane had found himself in a similar situation, but this time with Lloris on his team and Trapp on the other. In the 28th minute of the Tottenham-Eintracht Frankfurt Champions League, he scored the 1-0 penalty. Already in 92, he had another and threw it as the second to Lloris on Saturday, high a little to the left of him. Without so much pressure: they won 3-2.
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