This sentence inevitably comes up after each session: “Anyway, penalty shootout is a lottery”, and almost all the time, these few words are spoken by those who have just experienced a failure. Can this exercise be summed up well apart from a simple coin tossed in the air? And above all why France, in club or with the national team, regularly underperforms in penalties? The 2006 and 2022 World Cup finals against Italy and Argentina respectively, the round of 16 of Euro 2021 against Switzerland but also more recently Rennes-Shakhtar Donetsk and Monaco-Bayer Leverkusen: the There is no shortage of examples in recent years to illustrate the French difficulties when this moment of ax comes.
Yet France also had successes after the extension, with France-Brazil 1986 and France-Italy 1998 in particular, but that is starting to date. A dizzying statistic to illustrate this: since Di Biagio in 1998, no opposing shooter has missed his attempt against the Blues in a major tournament… For Le Point, Grégory Coupet believes that shots on goal are not taken seriously enough in the French mentality. The former goalkeeper of OL and the Blues insists in particular on training. “I explain these difficulties at home, because it is not in the French culture to work with as much application as the other exercises. For penalties, we often have fun, it’s at the end of the training session and there is no pressure imposed by the staff. It’s not the case for everyone of course, but most of the time we take it as entertainment. “And yet, the penalty requires rigor and unfailing seriousness: game of looks, run-up, choice of area… Several factors must be taken into account before starting.
The bottle of Shakhtar Donetsk goalkeeper Anatoliy Trubin last night. Penalties are not a lottery… ?? pic.twitter.com/sPFCoLbIb7
In his book Eleven meters, the solitude of the penalty shooter, the English journalist Ben Lyttleton evoked the problem of this sequence which seems so easy. “Penalties have always been a part of football, but because it looks so simple at first glance, it’s often looked down on. After all, for pros who train and play every day, there’s no reason for it to be difficult, the exercise consisting of scoring from eleven meters from goal. But it often is, and that’s why the penalty is so fascinating. »
On the side of the staff of the Blues, we have no difficulty in recognizing the absence of particular work on the shots on goal, considering that it was impossible to reproduce the real conditions of a session. “Taking penalties in training without pressure, having fun, and taking penalties in a match, with the pressure of the result and the public, that has nothing to do”, estimated Didier Deschamps in 2016.
For Bruno Génésio, who had a big disappointment with Stade Rennes in this exercise last week, randomness is an integral part of the penalty shootout. “I’ll give you a few names: Mbappé, Pirlo, Chevtchenko, Baggio… You know they all missed a shot on goal in their careers? So when I am told that it is a technical gesture, of course. But the technical gesture depends on the pressure, the fatigue, the emotion […] When you go from the central circle to the penalty spot, at the central circle you say to yourself: “I’m going to shoot there.” You get to the middle, you think, “I might not shoot there.” Then you get to the penalty spot and you change your mind again. Yes, but then shouldn’t you work more on controlling your emotions?
Annecy – Laurent Guyot on the shots on goal: “I forbid them the Neymar race” ??https://t.co/ULqP0u7w16
From the goalkeeper’s point of view, this situation is just as delicate to understand and manage. Grégory Coupet tells how he felt the penalty shootout, he who notably experienced a trying session with OL against PSV Eindhoven in 2005, which resulted in elimination in the quarter-finals of the Champions League. “It’s a very psychological exercise, very difficult to work on in training, because you will never find the same pressure and the same stress as in a match. It’s dramaturgy, the impression that the goal for the goalkeeper is huge! The shots on goal require concentration and surgical precision, you have to succeed in imposing significant rigor on yourself. Let’s not forget that a well-taken penalty is normally unstoppable, even if goalkeepers like Gianluigi Donnarumma are getting taller and taller. »
Despite new tools at their disposal and more and more ways to improve their reflexes, doorkeepers must have a share of madness and instinct for this exercise. “We work a lot with video,” says Grégory Coupet. We now have software that allows us to see the penalties taken by the same player. If someone shoots ten, you can pretty much guess their favored zone but most of the time you get tricked: hard shots, panenkas… foot on the line, it’s less obvious now. »
