CHAPTER 2

THE OSLO SOLUTION?

The answer to England’s problems may be found in a wooded northern suburb of Oslo, in an unprepossessing office in Sognsvann located next to Norway’s swanky Olympiatoppen training center. Taking the city train out north, you pass the Ullevaal, Norway’s national stadium, where, in the 2012 Norwegian Cup final, second division side Hødd caused a sensation by beating top-flight Tromsø 4–2 on penalties.

In his office, former soccer player Dr. Geir Jordet clicks up penalty after penalty on his computer screen. Jordet used to play for second division side Strømmen, but his career took an altogether different course after Ricardo saved David Beckham’s penalty at Euro 2004. At the time, Jordet was studying sports psychology at the Norwegian School of Sports Sciences. He had just written his dissertation, about the peripheral vision of elite midfielders, and was invited on to a Norwegian radio station, P3, to talk about England’s defeat.

Jordet criticized Beckham for not checking the penalty spot properly before his kick; fellow guest Henning Berg, a former teammate of Beckham’s at Manchester United, insisted that Beckham was as mentally tough as they come, and laid into Jordet. Jordet took it badly—“I felt like crap”—and when he moved to Holland for a job at the University of Groningen one month later, he changed the focus of his research to examine the psychology of penalties. He is obviously more sensitive than he looks.

The university had good access to contacts at the Dutch FA and it happened that Jordet, through his work back home, knew a few Swedish national team players who had played in Norway. He pooled these contacts and suggested a unique study into what players thought about during a shoot-out. He interviewed, at length and in one-on-ones, ten of the fourteen players who took penalties for either Holland or Sweden in their Euro 2004 quarterfinal shoot-out. The game had finished 0–0 after extra time. With the score 2–2 on penalties, Zlatan Ibrahimovic missed for Sweden; two penalties later, Phillip Cocu’s miss leveled the scores. After five penalties each it went to sudden death and Sweden captain Olof Mellberg, then a high-profile player at Juventus, had his shot saved by Edwin van der Sar. Arjen Robben scored the winning Dutch penalty for their first ever shoot-out success.

Jordet came up with the most honest depiction of players’ stresses and anxieties throughout the process and divided up his findings into three academic studies, one of which, “Stress, coping and emotions on the world stage: the experience of participating in a major soccer penalty shoot-out,” is particularly fascinating. For the purpose of his interviews, Jordet broke up the shoot-out into four phases:

1. The Break after Extra Time

2. The Midcircle

3. The Walk

4. At the Penalty Mark

Figure 3: Moments of highest anxiety in a penalty shoot-out

He then assessed each player’s reaction at each phase. Six interviewees knew before Phase 1 that they would be taking a penalty; two specifically did not want to take one—one even said, “In advance, I had personally said that I did not want to take one”—and another was annoyed that three other teammates had, during Phase 1, expressly ruled themselves out of taking a penalty. Four players felt more stressed when they were told what number they would be shooting, as they didn’t know and therefore couldn’t prepare for what the game situation would then be; another four were calm or relaxed.

Surprisingly, it was Phase 2 that was the most stressful for the players, particularly those on the losing side (Sweden), who were not standing as a group nor talking to or encouraging each other. “We hardly talked about anything during the shoot-out,” one player said. “Nothing. I didn’t say anything and nobody said anything to me.” This was the phase when Gareth Southgate admitted that negative thoughts affected his performance. Only three players used the Midcircle phase to focus on their own penalty; for the others, tension grew as they waited for their shots. “I became incredibly nervous,” said one player. “I thought it showed on television that my legs were shaking, that’s how nervous I was.” Another became less nervous after a teammate had missed. “First, I felt bitter and angry, but then the nervousness went away. I became much calmer.”

The Walk, Phase 3, was far less stressful for these players than you might expect, though the loneliness of it, for three players, was the toughest part of the shoot-out process to deal with. One was comforted as soon as he got to the ball: “Is it not so that things get less stressful if you have something in your hands? I swirled it around a little bit. I think it was very important.” Three players also noticed their anxiety decrease during the walk.

By Phase 4 only two players were expressing anxiety. One broke from his normal routine to turn away from the goalkeeper, which Jordet interpreted as a classic avoidance strategy.

His conclusion was that coaches could learn something about every phase of the shoot-out: from Phase 1, that players like to know the order in which they’ll be kicking as early as possible, and don’t like surprises (or teammates bailing on them); from Phase 2, that passively waiting for your turn throws up negative emotions; from Phase 3, that the solitariness of the walk requires a coping mechanism; and from Phase 4, how best to face the goalkeeper in a confrontation.

The three papers launched Jordet as a rising star in the field of sports psychology, and today he is Director of Psychology at the Norwegian Centre of Football Excellence. “I look at how you can most effectively think and feel to get the best performance, and also how to deal with failure,” he said. One of the teams he now works with would collapse whenever they conceded the first goal, so he was brought in to stop the rot.

Because of his academic background, Jordet has a more data-driven approach to sports psychology. When I asked him why England so often lose on penalties, he came up with several possible explanations.

“I spent three years searching for the perfect penalty,” he told me. “I looked at the ideal number of steps you can take in a run-up, whether you should kick the ball high or low, strike it with power or go for accuracy, and there are no real significant effects. The big effects were all about pressure and how you deal with stress. It was not about football, but psychology.”

One of these psychological factors was, as we have seen, the weight of history. Jordet did a study on the effect losing one or two shoot-outs had on the next shoot-out.* For example, would England be more likely to lose a shoot-out in its next major tournament simply because it had lost its last two shoot-outs? The answer is yes.

Figure 4: Preceding team outcome and individual shot performance

As you can see from Figure 4, a player’s likelihood of converting a penalty for a team whose last two shoot-outs ended in defeat drop considerably, to 57%, even if that player was not part of the team at the time of those defeats. The winning habit is also contagious: the chances of scoring for a side that has won its last two shoot-outs rises to 89%. The cycle of defeat, though, is a vicious one. The figures are even lower for a player who took a penalty in the last shoot-out defeat—even if that player scored the last time. His likelihood of scoring drops to 45%. I asked Jordet if England’s regular failures and Germany’s successes skewed the numbers, and they did not.

You can see why. Imagine a nine-year-old boy, let’s call him Ashley, whose first experience of watching England at a major tournament ends in a shoot-out defeat. That leaves its own scar. As Ashley grows up and becomes a professional, he sees England lose two more shoot-outs. By now he is playing for his country, and England lose another two shoot-outs. Ashley then becomes a senior player and scores in shoot-outs for his club; but the idea that winning a shoot-out with England is much harder has already taken root. He is thirty-one and experienced when it’s his turn to take a penalty for England. He misses.

This backs up studies in social psychology that reveal that the negative effects of bad things affect us much more dramatically than the positive effects of good things.* Penalties distil this effect: rather than one team doing well, the other team doing badly is what makes the difference in most shoot-outs. England’s failures lead to more failures. But why are they failing in the first place?

As a psychologist, Jordet has pinpointed two penalty strategies that players use when they are extranervous—avoidance strategies. For regular penalty takers their impact is less significant, as they might be part of a well-rehearsed routine, but for the infrequent kickers in the shoot-out—“they are the more interesting ones for me, because for them it comes down to pure psychology,” said Jordet—these correlate to performance.*

One is when a player turns his back on the goalkeeper after spotting the ball to start his run-up. “You can’t turn your back forever, at some point you have to turn around and face the stress full on,” Jordet said. He clicks up picture after picture of players in the center circle facing away from the goal where the shoot-out is taking place: Paul Ince at Euro 96, two years before he missed one at the 1998 World Cup; Ricardo Carvalho at Chelsea’s 2008 Champions League final loss in Moscow (in which Roman Abramovich also has his hands clamped on the back of his head, looking down at his feet); Ukraine coach Oleg Blokhin watched his side beat Switzerland in the 2006 World Cup from the dressing room, as he couldn’t bear it.

Jordet then clicked on to the statistical breakdown of players who turn their backs on the goalkeeper after spotting the ball.

Figure 5: Country and avoidance looking

As Figure 5 shows, England players did this a whopping 57% of the time, compared to 17% for Holland and a minuscule 5% for Spain. These figures are particularly dramatic, not because England are out in first, but because no other country comes close to their avoidance looking strategy. On its own this is not a clear indicator of performance, but when allied to another avoidance strategy, that of rushing to take a penalty kick, there is a clearer correlation. This can be seen in a table of reaction times after the referee blows his whistle to signify that the penalty taker can start his run-up.

There may not seem that much difference between these numbers—they are fractions of a second—but there is one (by way of comparison, Usain Bolt’s average reaction time is around 0.17 second). No nation is faster at taking penalties than England, whose average reaction time is just 0.28 second. The reason Jamie Carragher was made to take a second penalty against Portugal was because he rushed his first one (he rushed the second as well). Back in 1996, Gareth Southgate still seems to be walking back to his mark when the referee blows, and he uses that as a signal abruptly to stop walking and instead start his run-up. As he said in his book Woody and Nord, “All I wanted was the ball: put it on the spot, get it over and done with.” Chris Waddle, referring to his penalty miss in 1990, said something similar: “I just wanted it to be over.”

Figure 6: Country and response speed

Steven Gerrard felt even more rushed before his penalty against Ricardo in the 2006 World Cup. As he wrote in Gerrard: My Autobiography, “I was ready. Elizondo wasn’t. Blow the whistle! Fucking get a move on, ref! Why the wait? I’d put the ball on the spot, Ricardo was on his line. Why do I have to wait for the bloody whistle? Those extra couple of seconds seemed like an eternity and they definitely put me off. Doesn’t he know I’m on edge? Jesus Christ! I was screaming inside. In training, it seemed so easy: ball down, step back, run in, goal. No wait, no tension. Not here. Not with Elizondo delaying everything. At last he blew, but my focus had gone. The moment I made contact with the ball I knew it wasn’t going where I’d planned. It was 18 inches from my chosen spot, making it easier for Ricardo. Saved. Nightmare.”

Jordet told me that players prepare their shots twice as fast when they are under extreme pressure, and that a relatively large proportion of the players who prepare their penalties quickly—and that includes taking the ball and putting it on the spot—fail to score. He showed me a video of Marco van Basten, who scored over a hundred penalties in his career and was the world’s best player when he stepped up for Holland in the Euro 92 semifinal shoot-out against Denmark. Van Basten spotted the ball far quicker than he normally did, and his shot was saved.

A team that reached a recent Norwegian Cup final was made aware of this factor. The game went to a shoot-out. Two of the players were almost yellow-carded for waiting too long—eleven seconds—to take their penalty. Both scored.

Jordet acknowledges this may be taking the findings too far, as the data suggests that many players miss because they rush their preparation, not that players score more the longer they wait. “Waiting for five to ten seconds can bring on a series of new psychological challenges that the player needs to cope with, such as thinking too much about the mechanics of the performance. My advice would be to make sure that players don’t rush by simply asking them to take an extra breath, lasting for half a second or a second, and not necessarily more.”

As the average penalty success record is around 78%, failure from one penalty in a five-kick shoot-out should be expected. That figure drops to 71% in World Cup shoot-outs—a reflection, Jordet believes, of how increased pressure affects players.

For teams facing England, though, the figure rises. Let’s go back to those first penalty shoot-out tables. In England’s seven European Championship or World Cup matches that have gone to a shoot-out, their opponents have scored 83% (29/35) of their penalties. England themselves have scored 66% of penalties in shoot-outs (23/35), and Jordet thinks he knows why they are so far below the average.

“The causes of England’s problems with penalties are multi-fold,” he said, suggesting there are higher expectations on players in England than in other countries, and those players struggle to respond to that. “The pressure also mounts from history, as the more you lose, the more you lose. The effects of those expectations and history become multiplied as England is one of the most individualistic countries in the world and has a media that focuses on scapegoats.”*

He conducted a study looking at the top eight European nations in shoot-outs. He then calculated how many times goalkeepers dived the right way. If a goalkeeper dives the right way, his chances of saving a penalty increase by around 30%.

Figure 7: Goalkeepers who dive the right way*

Against Holland—63%

Against England—58%

Against Italy—46%

Against Germany—46%

Against France—45%

Against Czech Republic—37%

Against Spain—35%

Average—47%

So goalkeepers get it right more often than not against Holland and England than against other teams. How could this be? Are Dutch and English players easier to read? What might they have in common that the Czechs and the Spanish don’t have? It’s not turning their backs (only 17% of Dutch players do that) and it’s not rushing, because while England are the quickest, Spain are also pretty fast. “This is the table where there is some element of chance involved,” Jordet explained, “and I suspect England has been unlucky in history.” Ah, so it is luck! All those managers who derided the shoot-out as a lottery after losing were right all along!

Not quite.

“You can’t rule out the role of luck in these things, like who wins the toss, which teams have all their best kickers available, that kind of thing,” Jordet added. “And I accept that you can’t control everything, and even great players can miss. In part it is a lottery, but you can do many things to make it a lot less of a lottery.”

The only time Jordet clammed up in our two meetings was when I asked him who he has worked for. Discretion is such an important part of his job, he replied, that he would never reveal any of the teams he works for (although he did have an AC Milan pendant hanging on his office wall).

“But you’ve worked for Holland’s youth teams,” I persisted.

“That’s right, but I never mentioned that until the coach, Foppe de Haan, went public with it. With everyone else, I have a vow of silence.”

So maybe Jordet was already working with the England team. He has a good poker (or penalty taking) face, so it was hard to know.

Jordet first started working with the Dutch youngsters after moving to Groningen and was part of the backroom team for the Under-20 World Cup, held in Holland in 2005. “I tried to create a positive aspect around penalties. I told them this was their moment to shine, but it didn’t really work.” Holland lost a shoot-out 10–9 to Nigeria in the quarterfinals. “As I watched, I thought, ‘I’ll never work with the Dutch again, they’ll never let me in the country again.’” They did, and in 2007 de Haan called on Jordet to help with the preparations for the Under-21 European Championship. By then Jordet had developed a new program. “I worked out which behaviors would increase the probability of doing well, because that’s all it is, helping them have a bigger chance to succeed.”

There were two strategies that Jordet focused on with his players.

1. Take an extra second.

Jordet showed the team van Basten’s quick penalty in the Euro 92 semifinal—the players were toddlers when that happened—and explained the table which showed England’s players are almost as fast as Bolt when it came to reacting to the referee’s whistle. He told the players how important it was to take their time.

“When I took a penalty, I rested a second and took a breath and I knew exactly where to shoot the ball,” said Gianni Zuiverloon, whose job it was to take the thirty-second and final penalty in a dramatic semifinal shoot-out against England in that 2007 tournament. The game had finished 1–1, the first five penalties had finished 4–4, and Holland had already missed two chances, via Arnold Kruiswijk and Daniel de Ridder, to win the game. Zuiverloon had already scored with penalty number seven and his second strike won the game 13–12.

“Taking time is not a guarantee that you will score, but at least you will not miss like so many other players from my studies have done, by carelessly and sloppily rushing through their movements before their shots,” Jordet reiterated. “By focusing on a strategy grounded in data you will immediately feel more in control of yourself and the situation and therefore it’s more likely you will do well. Taking an extra second to breathe can often have a relaxing and centering effect, and though it will hardly bring players into a meditative state, it may provide some buffer to the negative effects of stress.”

After the game, Jordet analyzed the gaze behavior and response times of both teams during the shoot-out. He was pleased to note that the Dutch players had taken his advice on board.

Every single Dutch player looked at the goalkeeper while walking to his mark after spotting the ball; nearly 40% of English players opted for the avoidance strategy and looked away. The Dutch players also took more time before kicking the ball: their average response time after the referee’s whistle was one second, compared to England’s 0.51 second, which in itself is almost twice as slow as the senior national team’s average.

Figure 8: Intervention effects

2. Have a failure strategy in place.

The worst presentation he ever gave, Jordet told me with a cringe, was to the University Hospital in Groningen about performing under pressure. He had spent a week inside the hospital learning about the pressures surgeons face, what happens if and when they make errors, and how they communicate about failure and overcome it. Jordet wanted to tell them what surgeons could learn from soccer players, but when it came to delivering his findings he realized it was the other way around: soccer players had more to learn from surgeons. He choked. His presentation sucked. It can happen to anyone, even the experts.

Jordet learned from the experience and realized that soccer players, at least those he had worked with, had never been told how to behave when they make errors. The example he gave came from the Sweden–Holland shoot-out in Euro 2004. There is a picture of Mellberg after his miss, walking back to his teammates. Nine of them stand on the center line, arms linked, like a powerful yellow wall. Mellberg approaches, looking down, upset. The wall does not move. The wall is not a welcoming place.

Jordet’s “Error Management” paradigm, learned from his hospital case study, was a simple one:

1. Embrace your errors

2. Success leads to complacency

3. Anticipate small errors before they happen

“There was no social support, no plan for defeat, so before the 2007 tournament with the Holland Under-21s, I made a plan,” he said.

Jordet spotted that most teams stand on the center line or behind it while the shoot-out is in progress. He told the Dutch to stand at the front of the center circle and link arms. When a teammate scored, he urged them to celebrate with gusto, to build the confidence in the group; but his most significant directive was what to do when a player missed. He told the players to move forward and welcome the player back into the group. The regulations state that players must stay in the circle and Jordet warned them to “respect the referee,” but the key was the forward movement so that the player was immediately reintegrated into the group. The plan was not just to make the player who missed feel better but for the next player in line to see that there was a strategy in place if he missed too, to decrease his anxiety levels.

On penalty nine, when Kruiswijk missed Holland’s first chance to win the shoot-out, the players jumped away in anger before quickly remembering Jordet’s instructions. They then poured forward to usher Kruiswijk back into the group.

Holland went on to win the tournament, and after their celebrations, Jordet employed a student to speak to each player. He showed me a selection of their comments.

“In almost every penalty shoot-out there is always going to be a miss.”

“It’s normal to miss a penalty once in a while.”

“Nobody misses a penalty on purpose.”

But the most helpful lesson Jordet had given them, many of them agreed, was this: “We had a plan in place for what to do when we missed.”

So, I pushed him again. Regardless of whether you have worked for England or not, what would you do to solve England’s problems?

“In the way that I think is the opposite to what is being done,” he replied. “Like any team, they are trying to push it away when in fact they need to treat it head on. The coaches are big avoiders of the subject: they don’t want to talk about it, they don’t want to practice properly, and then it only becomes an issue or important when it’s in the present.

“I would give the players known success factors to hold on to, to give them a higher chance of scoring. Also, I would prepare for failure, so they know what to do if one player misses. They need to not rush their penalties. And they need to know the difference between practicing penalties and preparing for penalties.”

He showed me a picture taken during an England training session at the 2006 World Cup. Steven Gerrard is taking a penalty, and all the players are standing on the edge of the box, waiting for their turn. “Practicing penalties is mindless if it’s not planned or deliberate,” Jordet commented. “That picture looks wrong. That’s not a shoot-out. You don’t take penalties with the players around you. It’s bad practice to rehearse a way of doing things that is much easier than it will be. Of course the players will be intimidated when they have to do the walk to the spot, if they have not done it before in practice.”

Before Euro 2012, every England player took part in a penalty competition after training. Six players against each of the three goalkeepers, three kicks each, after every session. Their records were assessed. But did they re-create any match conditions? Did they play fans’ noise through loudspeakers as the Czech Republic did in 1976? Did they make the players walk from one penalty spot to the other before the kick, as Guus Hiddink did to prepare his South Korean players the day before they beat Spain on penalties in the 2002 World Cup?

*

Was Jordet right? It all made sense to me, but then I’d never played for England nor, aside from my Packie Bonner “moment,” taken an important penalty. So I sought answers from the player with the best penalty record in Europe’s biggest five leagues: Rickie Lambert. When we spoke, the Liverpool and England forward was on a run of thirty-three consecutive successful spot kicks.

Lambert knows his penalties. He peppered our conversation with examples from the past: Dida stopping John Arne Riise’s effort in the 2005 Champions League final, Pepe Reina becoming the first goalkeeper to stop Mario Balotelli scoring from the spot. He remembered watching England lose to West Germany in 1990, when he was just eight, and said the 1996 defeat “was a hard one for me to take.” Understandably he did not want to divulge the secrets behind his own penalty success, but he was keen to look at Jordet’s findings. These are his responses:

1. Weight of history: the more shoot-outs you lose, the more likely you are to miss a penalty.

I’m not going to argue with the numbers, but from the type of person I am, I wouldn’t say it’s true. If you go into a tournament with new players, what happened in the past shouldn’t mean anything. I can understand why it might happen to some players, but that’s not how I would feel about it.

2. Turning your back on the goalkeeper as an avoidance strategy.

When I put the ball down, I walk backward and take a set number of strides to get to my mark. I think if you turn around after spotting the ball, it does show some nerves. Maybe it means the taker doesn’t want eye contact with the goalkeeper in case he plays mind games. I can see why that might be the case.

3. Reaction times after the referee blows his whistle to take a penalty.

I can definitely see how that is related to nerves. Sometimes I have been nervous before a penalty and rushed it. There are always some nerves before you kick, it depends how confident you feel at the time. I see a penalty as a free shot from twelve yards, and a professional should score from that distance ten times out of ten, so if you hit it well, you’ll be all right. The minute you start thinking about where the goalkeeper might dive, or if you think he might reach it, then you are giving him an advantage. But I would agree that the more nervous you are, the more you would rush the penalty.

4. England goalkeepers have a poor success rate.

I don’t think there’s anything in this. I actually think these figures are down to luck because English goalkeepers have been confronted with good penalties. Think of the quality of the penalties that West Germany took in 1990, or Portugal in 2004. I don’t remember watching and being frustrated, thinking the goalkeeper could have done better. For the goalkeeper, there is luck involved; it’s about gambling and going to the right side. OK, they may have seen the video analysis, but they still have to judge where to go and make the save. As a taker, you just don’t want to make it easy for them, but if they dive for a shot that’s going to hit the inside of the side-netting, you have to hold your hands up and say, “Quality save.” The problem with not saving so many is that it then puts more pressure on your takers. For me, I try and hit the penalty as if I know the goalkeeper is going that way as well; and that if he does, he still won’t be able to save it.

5. Opposition goalkeepers dive the right way 58% of the time against England, 46% against Germany and 35% against Spain.

Again, I think this is down to luck. I don’t think there are many goalkeepers capable of waiting until the ball has been struck, then diving the right way. The goalkeeper normally decides before or at point of impact, so that’s why I say those numbers are down to luck.

Lambert was also unconvinced by the idea of implementing a failure strategy. “Missing for your club is very different to missing for your country, as with your club you can probably rectify the mistake very quickly. With your country, you might not get another chance, and there is no manual about how you will feel if you miss. I can imagine that would affect you much more emotionally.”

So what about discussing that with a psychologist beforehand, maybe get some coping mechanisms if required?

“Are you joking? If I was a manager and I heard someone talking about how you might cope if you miss, I would get him out of the building. It should be all about ‘when you score’ and ‘how you will feel when you score.’ Nothing else.”

Lambert has won all four shoot-outs in which he has taken part: two for Bristol Rovers, when he kicked (and scored) third, and two for Southampton, when he was successful first up. I mentioned Le Tissier’s frustration at not getting an opportunity in 1998 and floated the idea of a specialist player coming off the bench in extra time specifically to take a penalty. “If he was a specialist he would still be confident but it would be a better situation if he had been involved in the game beforehand,” Lambert said. “You need touches of the ball to get confident, to control the ball, and to get to know the feeling of the turf. Having confidence in the turf sounds silly but it’s very important. All those things mean it would be a hard task for a new player coming on—they would prefer to be on the pitch.”

Lambert did agree with Jordet, and Michael Owen, that the media plays a part, even if it is unknowingly, in increasing the penalty pressure. “Good news is good but negative news is better,” he remarked. “The players know that if they miss they will get slaughtered by the papers—but in other countries, I doubt that is going through their players’ minds.”

*

“You will never be able to replicate the occasion 100%, we know that, but you can try for 70% or 80%,” Jordet told me. “It’s all about the performance mindset and for regular penalty takers, they already have it. That’s why for me, the others, those who have not done it much or before, are more interesting.”

A look at the players who have missed the final penalties for England in shoot-outs—Waddle, Southgate, Batty, Vassell, Carragher, Ashley Cole—suggests that Jordet’s work with nonfrequent penalty takers would be beneficial to the team.

“For these guys, it comes down to pure psychology. The fascination of the shoot-out is that it puts psychology in pole position.”