Posts Tagged penalties

Groups stages, tight games, can’t afford to lose, Germany, England. This must only add up to one thing, penalties!

Are we going to suffer again, will there be the same agony as in prior years? Penalties is another area I have looked at and I think the findings may be of use to any prospective England goalkeeper facing a penalty, football traders may also benefit.

First off, you can reach some easy conclusions. From spot to net, the ball will travel just 12 yards and it is estimated that this will happen in about 0.30 seconds. Stikers should score from this distance! This also forces each goalkeeper to make a decision about what to do, BEFORE, the ball is struck; he has to anticipate which way to dive. He could dive left, right or stand still.

This is where a subtle peice of psychology comes into play, it is what I shall call the action / inaction bias. Imagine the scenario, you know that any goal in a match in the knockout stages will be significant and that by saving a penalty you will almost certainly have a significant impact on the match and on your status. What do you do? If you stand in the middle of the goal like a lemon you could be a national pariah if a goal is conceded. Dive spectacularly and tip it around the post and the praise will come flooding in. What happens is that the goalkeeper ends up facing the same dilemma and regret pang as a gambler or trader. The goalkeeper is fearing the negative consequences of his actions, rather than making a logical and reasoned choice. This fear is so overwhelming it has a strange effect. In 286 matches analysed, the goalkeeper dived in one direction or another 268 times. He went for glory 94% of the time. Did the goalkeeper make a logical choice? To do this you need to analyse where the ball went.

Over the same 286 matches the penalty taker more or less evenly distributed the shots left, right and centre either by design or accident. In the data I looked at there was a bias to the right hand side but there could be many reasons for that. Excluding the bias it was a random shot choice. Therefore the goal keepers definitely were making a sub-optimal decision by choosing to dive so often. Penalty takers struck the ball down the middle nearly 29% of the time, goalkeepers only stood there around 6% of the time! If you are a goalkeeper, standing idly would appear to be a decent choice but as shots were equally distributed then any random choice would be sensible.

If you are a striker then you should engage in some gamesmanship to encourage the goalkeeper to dive, then send the ball down the middle. But there is more logic to taking and saving and that’s what I will cover tomorrow….