Taking Panenka-style penalties has traditionally been considered audacity, or recklessness, but when Karim Benzema chose that solution at the Etihad on Tuesday night, he was perhaps making the sensible choice, even though he had never done so before. At least, he had opted for one of the options analyzed with the Madrid coaching staff, supported by data from the goalkeeper preparation group and practiced in training.
For a few years, each penalty carries in some way with all the previous ones. And the last of the French were a considerable weight for both him and Ederson, the Manchester City goalkeeper. Benzema had shot his last four down the left, and three had been caught by goalkeepers: one Dituro, from Celta, on April 2 in Balaídos; and the other two, Sergio Herrera, from Osasuna, on April 20 in El Sadar.
Ederson knew that when in the 82nd minute of the game, with the score at 4-2, he was waiting on the line for the referee’s whistle and Benzema’s run towards the ball. The Brazilian knew it just as Herrera knew six days before what had happened in Vigo, and that is why, according to what he said after the match, he threw himself down to his right, the striker’s left: “I was clear about it. He knew that it was his safety side, and he also knew that he was coming off three penalties taken against Celta”, he said.
He stopped that shot, and a few minutes later he found himself with the ball again at eleven meters and the Frenchman waiting for the referee’s signal. There he also acted on what he had learned in the Balaídos match: “It so happened that against Celta he also missed a penalty. The second he threw threw it to the safety side of him, and that’s why I’ve relied there,” he explained. Indeed, Benzema repeated a corner and sent the ball down to his left, where Herrera was waiting for it.
If you go further back in the Frenchman’s record with penalties, you find a strong general tendency to place the ball in that corner. Opta keeps records of where he has put every shot he has taken for Real Madrid: of the 25 he has attempted, 13 have gone to that corner, more than half.
On Tuesday at the Etihad another factor also came into play: with Madrid, Benzema has only been stopped three penalties, and all three had been this month, and all three had been sent to the same place. Ederson and the Manchester City goalkeeping team also knew that, and from that information the choice of the Brazilian was derived, who launched himself to his left, the side that the Frenchman has least explored in his shots. Benzema had already crashed enough in that theoretical safety zone of his that Herrera spoke about after frustrating him in Pamplona.
The Madrid captain, increasingly dedicated to personal work and obsessed with improving details, had taken all of this into account when preparing for the match: he had seen videos of Ederson from the Luis Llopis goalkeeper preparation group, they had he’d recalled his own launch history data, they’d discussed alternatives to that left corner, and he’d spent several days training on the solutions. Rodrygo told it: “He was training like this. so much yesterday [lunes] Like the day before yesterday in training I saw a little and he trained like this. The people on the bench already knew that he was going to bite, ”he explained.
Carlo Ancelotti, however, said he wasn’t so sure: “I didn’t know if I was shooting it to the right or to the left. This shot surprised me a bit.” What he had no doubt about was who would take care of the shot, despite recent mistakes: “We have never thought about changing the player who takes the penalty,” he said, in the line that he opened that same night in Pamplona, when he assured that if they had had a third launch, Benzema would have also taken care of it.
They were all very clear. At the moment in which the referee whistled for Laporte’s hand, the ball reached Ceballos, who controlled it with his chest and immediately threw it to the Frenchman, who began to walk with him around the lime point, while the City players surrounded the referee with their protests.
Not even the first panenka was a reckless improvisation, according to the former soccer player himself in an interview in the Spanish magazine that bears his name: “The coach and everyone knew how he was going to throw it. Maybe it was a surprise abroad. The only person who told me that in such a serious game I shouldn’t dare was Ivo Viktor, the goalkeeper. We were roommates and he told me that if he dared me to take the penalty my way he wouldn’t let me back in the room. Fortunately, it went well.”
Antonin Panenka publicly presented his creation in the play-off of the Euro 1976 final against West Germany in Belgrade. After the first seven pitches, all successful, the score favored the Czechs 4-3. Then it was the turn of Uli Hoeness, who shot high, leaving Panenka with the opportunity to give his country the title against the last world and European champions. He ignored his roommate’s threat and outsmarted Sepp Maier by creating him. The German goalkeeper, like Ederson in Manchester, threw himself that June day to the left of him.
With this beautiful solution, which he used for the first time in an official match, Benzema settled a small crisis and extended Madrid’s life in the Champions League by managing to shorten City’s lead to 4-3. It was the same option chosen by Sergio Ramos, his predecessor as a Madrid shooter, after sending a penalty to the third stands of the Bernabéu in the tiebreaker shoot-out in the Champions League semi-final against Bayern in 2012. Two months later, in the round of the semifinal of the European Championship against Portugal, Ramos scored Panenka.
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