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The art & psychology of the perfect penalty
by Ben Lyttleton
Bantam Press, £14.99
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien
From WSC 333 November 2014
The glib explanation for the English fascination with penalties is because they lose so many shootouts and are thus mesmerised by the idea of actually being good at them, somewhat like a gormless youth trying to work out the secret of successfully conversing with an attractive woman. Of course, just as a confident man is likely to have more success in a nightclub than a self-conscious one, if they (by which I mean England players) spent less time thinking about penalties, they’d probably fare a little better at them.
Ben Lyttleton explores this theme at length in Twelve Yards, a book which covers much the same ground as Andrew Anthony’s 2000 effort On Penalties (though it’s roughly twice as long). His conversation with Ricardo Pereira, the former Portugal goalkeeper whose penalty saves knocked England out of two different tournaments, soon becomes a faintly farcical catalogue of neurosis, jittery body language and general mental collapse.
Ricardo – who memorably took off the gloves to save Darius Vassell’s effort at Euro 2004 and then blasted in the winner himself – describes Vassell as “very nervous” in the run-up, notes that Steven Gerrard couldn’t look him in the eye and claims that Jamie Carragher’s “mind was fucked up” when the defender took what transpired to be his team’s final penalty in Gelsenkirchen in 2006. He finishes by giving three simple tips to England penalty-takers: focus on the positive, don’t think about the media and forget about the history. One of these might be easier to execute than the other two.
Lyttleton’s scope is nothing if not wide. He travels to South America to interview two penalty-taking keepers, José Luis Chilavert and Rogério Ceni, who ended their careers with well over 100 goals between them. “I was always calm,” Chilavert tells him with no discernible sarcasm. “I was playing a role on the pitch… Look, I could hardly be the hero with this face!”
He meets up with Antonin Panenka, scorer of the most famous penalty ever, outside a village pub near Prague, and discovers that while the legendary midfielder is justifiably proud of the clever little chip which won Euro 76, he also feels it has overshadowed everything else in his long career. Panenka theorises that the main reason for his worldwide fame is because his name “sounds the same in any language”.
But at times, you can sense Lyttleton straining to reach the word count (the book may have had more impact at a shorter length). One entire chapter is a retelling of the France v West Germany match in Seville in 1982, translated directly from a feature in France Football – it’s a very good read, admittedly, but relatively little of it has anything to do with penalties. There’s also a small handful of very bad mistakes – to pick one at random, Spain’s legendary keeper in the 1930s was named Ricardo Zamora, not Schavio Zamora. But this is a readable study of an almost unknowable art, as long as you don’t mind stumbling over yet another graph or table of stats every ten pages or so.
by Rafa Benítez
Headline, £20
Reviewed by Rob Hughes
From WSC 312 February 2013
While it’s still too early to judge Brendan Rodgers, the consensus on Liverpool’s post-war managers is pretty much in. Shankly and Paisley? Daft question. Dalglish? Still a legend, despite last season. Evans and Houllier? Both missed their chance and overstayed their time. Hodgson? Oh come on.
But no Liverpool chief has polarised opinion like Rafa Benítez. To some he remains the tactical giant who outmanoeuvred far superior teams on the way to Champions League nirvana in 2005 and whose plans for reasserting Liverpool’s dominance at home were only undone by the financial misdeeds of a pair of mad American owners. To others he’s the bloke who got lucky, made more disastrous transfer dealings than good ones, took us down into the Europa League and promptly buggered off to Milan with a £6 million pay-off.
Champions League Dreams is unlikely to make either camp scamper over to the other side. Aided by Telegraph writer Rory Smith, Benítez’s prose is often as clinical and perfunctory as his press conferences while he journeys through his six European campaigns at the club. It’s a smart narrative move. Ignoring his underwhelming achievements in the Premier League – only coming close in 2008-09 and that after an embarrassing post-Christmas collapse and the Robbie Keane fiasco – this book amounts to a Greatest Hits of Rafa’s time at Liverpool.
One thing it does shore up is his obsession for detail. Benítez happily reveals the extent of his DVD resource library, one that lined the walls at Melwood, filled the basement at home and even stuffed up the attic of his parents’ house in Madrid. Those DVDs and accompanying notes were filled with games, players and coaching sessions, all neatly categorised, numbered and instantly accessible through a database, what he describes as “not just a record of all the games I had managed and training sessions I had overseen in my career, but an extensive library of football around the world”. It was a system he applied to educate players about the opposition and how to improve.
Some of his written detail is enlightening, not least when explaining how Liverpool managed to outsmart Barcelona in 2007, pinching the win at the Nou Camp then, with a first 45 minutes of “possibly the best half of football, tactically, I saw in my time at Liverpool”, closing out the tie. Occasionally some of the incidental detail is precious. Steven Gerrard, for instance, catching a lift home from a passing milk float when unable to flag a taxi after celebrating the semi-final win against Chelsea that season.
The baffling sale of Xabi Alonso is dealt with, though hardly satisfactorily, with Benítez claiming he was backed into a corner by financial necessity and UEFA’s newly imposed overseas player ratios. While both hold a degree of truth, at no point does he concede that it was a colossal mistake or show any awareness of the huge demotivating effect Alonso’s departure had on the likes of Gerrard, Javier Mascherano and Fernando Torres.
If it’s tactical insight you’re after, this book might suit you fine. But those hoping to unlock the secrets and impulses of this complex individual will be little the wiser.
After a decade in the top flight Bolton seem destined for relegation, but Owen Coyle’s team are capable of conjuring up an unlikely belief and beating anyone on their day, argues Jon Callow
In August 2001, the Liverpool goalkeeper Sander Westerveld brought his career at the club to an early close with a late blunder that sent newly promoted Bolton Wanderers to the top of the table just three games into their current Premier League stint. Establishing themselves in the top division after years of ups and downs, Bolton became a tricky fixture for their distinguished guests. Liverpool collected just five points from their next five visits
to the Reebok.