The penalty shootout experience: 'I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy'

A version of this article was originally published in 2021, it has been updated before the knockout stages of Euro 2024…

It is the walk. A penalty shootout means the walk and the walk is the bit where football stops, where this game of instinct, noise and mayhem is reduced to stillness. There is no scope to think until that epic trudge when, pushed to the limit of physical endurance after a draining game, an intense tournament, a wearing season, think is all you can do. When your mind becomes an enemy.

To understand the miss and how it feels, you must first understand the walk, the only time footballers are both integral to the outcome and profoundly alone. A team game, a collective, will soon be boiled down to a gladiatorial confrontation, to you against the goalkeeper — but for now, it’s just you. You against you. Little wonder it turns players (and their ghostwriters), into philosophers.

“I felt I was stepping off the edge of the world into silence” — Chris Waddle (West Germany vs England, semi-final, 1990 World Cup: missed).

An “endless, terrible walk into one’s fears” — Andrea Pirlo (Italy vs France, final, 2006 World Cup: scored; Italy vs England, quarter-final, 2012 European Championship: scored).

“I just wanted to stop and cry my eyes out” — Paul Gascoigne (England vs Spain, quarter-final, Euro ’96: scored. Germany vs England, semi-final, Euro ’96: scored).

“That walk from the centre-circle is the longest, hardest 50 yards I’ve ever known” — Alan Shearer (England vs Spain, quarter-final, Euro ’96: scored. Germany vs England, semi-final, Euro ’96: scored. Argentina vs England, round of 16, 1998 World Cup: scored).

“I thought about being a kid and what it all meant” — Kevin Kilbane (Spain vs Republic of Ireland, round of 16, 2002 World Cup: missed).

“The walk seemed to take forever. It struck me how dark the night had become” — Gareth Southgate (Germany vs England, semi-final, Euro ’96: missed).

“That’s the worst part of it, that bloody walk” — Stuart Pearce (West Germany vs England, semi-final, 1990 World Cup: missed. England vs Spain, quarter-final, Euro ’96: scored. Germany vs England, semi-final, Euro ’96: scored).

“It felt like 40 miles. The pressure of the situation, knowing that your whole country depended on you and that a billion people around the world were watching you, ate away at me” — Steven Gerrard (Portugal vs England, quarter-final, 2006 World Cup: missed. Italy vs England, quarter-final, Euro 2012: scored).

“It takes around 20 to 30 seconds to cover the ground between the centre circle and the penalty spot. It’s amazing the amount of thought you can cram into such a short period when all you want to do is block out the world” — Frank Lampard (Portugal vs England, quarter-final, Euro 2004: scored. Portugal vs England, quarter-final, 2006 World Cup: missed).

“The penalty is with me every day, but the nightmare in myself is all about the long walk to the spot” — Daniele Massaro (Brazil vs Italy, final, 1994 World Cup: missed).

The miss is terrible, but it is also something tangible and allows you to grieve. The walk is pure horror.

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Actually, says Ben Lyttleton, author of 2014 book Twelve Yards, the definitive study of the “art and psychology of the perfect penalty kick”, although the walk “is a scary thing”, one “psychological study showed that the moment of highest anxiety was not the walk but the waiting in the centre-circle before the walk”.

He adds: “There is a feeling that once the walk begins, you are back in control of your own destiny and can rightly focus on your routine and execution. Waiting for others and hoping they succeed is beyond your control.”

“It’s not just the game,” says Shearer, a former England captain and columnist for The Athletic. “It’s the days leading up to it. It’s the night before, playing through your mind — ‘What if..?’ And then you find yourself praying for someone to pull you out of the mire. It’s worse in the last 10 minutes of extra time. It’s a creeping fear.”

That idea of control is interesting. Footballers are athletes; they are trained to do, to work together. Looking on (whether through injury, suspension or during a penalty shootout) is the ultimate loss of power and to begin that walk is to reclaim it, but the circumstances also conspire against control.

In 1990, Waddle had been “sweating it out for 120 minutes in the heart of Turin. I felt exhausted. The tournament seemed to have taken forever, that first game against the Republic of Ireland was a dim and distant memory… Even this semi-final against West Germany felt as if it had been going on for hours. My legs were like lead, my body was about half a stone lighter than when I’d started. I just wanted it to be over”.

Runners might describe this feeling as hitting ‘the wall’. People who have taken on a marathon would understand Waddle’s fogginess, the deadening fatigue that snakes into the brain, when you question everything, when darkness is like a tendril.

“The Chris Waddle who took that penalty was physically different from the Waddle who started the match,” says Sir Brendan Foster, the Olympian, founder of the Great North Run and long-time athletics commentator for the BBC. “His body had altered. There would be less weight behind the ball when he struck it. But when your body uses up that much energy, you don’t have the energy to think properly any more.”

As Lyttleton has written, teams now practise the walk as well as penalties themselves, structuring them at the end of training sessions, when bodies and minds are more tired. Yet if the walk is football’s equivalent of the wall for runners, it is not easy to replicate because it combines extreme mental pressure with extreme physicality. Twenty or 30 years ago, none of this was thought about.

“People don’t know what it’s like,” Gascoigne tells The Athletic about the shootout against Germany in the semi-final of Euro ’96. “As I was walking, I had a lump in my throat. I was on the verge of crying because I was so nervous. I was thinking, ‘I don’t want to do this’.”

“I wouldn’t wish taking a penalty in a shootout on my worst enemy,” Shearer says. “Seriously, it’s that bad. I was decent at them, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t getting tense or uptight in those moments, because I was. It’s fucking horrible. The stress of that walk is not wanting to let the 10 lads behind you down.”

Kilbane speaks to The Athletic from Canada, where he is living and working. The big story of Ireland’s participation in the 2002 World Cup took place before a ball was kicked, when a simmering Roy Keane self-combusted and returned home from their pre-tournament training camp. In the aftermath, reaching the knockout phase, where they drew 1-1 with Spain before being eliminated on penalties, was a fine achievement.

Kilbane views it differently, but we will come to that. “It must have been the worst shootout ever,” he says and he is right; Spain and Ireland’s combined five misses is a joint record for World Cup finals. By the time Kilbane came to take his, their fourth, Matt Holland and David Connolly had already failed.

“I was always going to take one,” he says. “We’d practised from the moment we arrived. Mick (McCarthy, the manager) set us up every other day, five on each team, stepping up to take them, but we practised every day anyway. I genuinely don’t think I missed one. I had a way of taking them — predominantly to the keeper’s left, but where I could put it to the other side if I saw him moving that way.

“It sounds like such a lame excuse, but the balls in that World Cup (the Adidas Fevernova) were so light; it was a new prototype and very different to what we used in the Premier League. It was like a beach ball. You could just see it in the way Matty hit his. It just rose.

“Once I’ve seen him hitting the crossbar, I have this negative mindset of doing something different. So as I’m walking, I’m thinking, ‘Don’t put it over the bar’.

Iker Casillas saves from Ireland’s Kilbane in the 2002 shootout against Spain (Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)

“And then I was thinking about people back home. I can vividly remember the 1990 World Cup and David O’Leary scoring his penalty against Romania and I thought about that. It wasn’t, ‘Be a hero’. It was just all these things rushing through my mind, including changing my technique. Mine was such a weak penalty.”

“I was the sixth man,” Southgate writes in his book, Woody And Nord. “It was my turn. No one had forced me to volunteer. Inside my head, the struggle had already begun: ‘You can deal with this. Be definite, look confident. Don’t change your mind. Don’t look at the keeper — don’t fall over’. I began to walk forward and suddenly there was an eerie quietness around the stadium.”

Walking into silence.

It is a shock to hear just how much the miss still gnaws at Kilbane, who made 110 appearances for his country, fourth most after Robbie Keane, Shay Given and John O’Shea.

Ireland don’t have the same tortured relationship with penalties as England and, in the circumstances, their 2002 World Cup felt like a success.

“I think about it a lot,” he says. “It’s always in my mind. It’s hard to forget about it… especially when journalists insist on ringing me up to ask about it.” Hopefully, this was said with a smile.

Kilbane, now 44, who played for West Bromwich Albion, Sunderland and Everton among others, has always been engaging and upbeat. This is why his words are a surprise.

“Even now, whenever there’s a shootout, I still get this huge knot in my stomach, exactly the same as when I missed back in 2002.

“I wouldn’t wish that feeling on anybody.”

“All I wanted to do as a boy was play for Ireland in a World Cup. It (the Spain tie) was the biggest game I played in and the biggest thrill and so it’s the ultimate disappointment. It could have been so much more. It’s a bitterness because of what happened and how things could have panned out differently.

“I associate that memory with disappointment, as a failure. It was about how I’d let my team-mates and Mick and the supporters down. It was thinking about myself as a kid again and what it meant to me watching the team win a shootout and… I probably had every thought imaginable.

“A lot of it is a blur. I cried. I don’t remember too much from the dressing room afterwards, but Mick congratulated us on what we’d achieved and where we’d come from; it wasn’t just the four games we played (at the finals), it was two years of qualification. But I was just so gutted — the only thing I wanted was to go home.

“Even when we got back to Dublin and we had 100,000 people at Phoenix Park to greet us, I didn’t want to be there.

“Looking back, I was wrong and probably wasn’t myself, but I didn’t embrace what we achieved. I couldn’t. We’ve only qualified for three World Cups in our history and to be part of one was incredible, but I couldn’t take that in. It’s your last kick, isn’t it? It stays with you.”

“I changed my mind at the last second and hit it at the other side. It hit my ankle, so I was lucky.” Gascoigne.

“The whole world was watching me and I felt it.” Southgate.

“When I watched it again on television, I could see my body shape was all wrong. It’s one of the basics you learn — get yourself over the ball and it has to keep low.” Waddle.

“I had such a strange feeling and that feeling hit me just as I approached the ball. It was as if I was just going to shoot, and I did. I just shot, as if it would be a surprise where the ball ended up, and I completely missed.” Zlatan Ibrahimovic (Sweden vs Netherlands, quarter-final, Euro 2004: missed).

Ibrahimovic blasted his Euro 2004 penalty high over the crossbar (Martin Rose/Bongarts/Getty Images)

“I had told Shearer I was going to drill the ball down the middle. That was the easy option, based on the theory that the keeper would move one way or the other. However, fatally, I decided at the last moment that I would place it” — David Batty (Argentina vs England, round of 16, 1998 World Cup: missed).

“Just before I started my run-up, I allowed the slightest flicker of doubt to come to mind. It’s human nature and there was nothing I could do to stop it.” Lampard.

“Just before the penalty I didn’t feel so bad, I was pretty confident of scoring. But the next 10 seconds, it’s like there’s been a blackout in my mind. Like I lost myself when the kick happened, like it was a dream.” Massaro.

“The referee would not blow his whistle. I looked across at him for four seconds, thinking, ‘C’mon ref, any chance?’, before he finally gave the signal. Those few seconds were crucial. My mind lurched from fragile certainty to anxiety.” Gerrard.

“I slumped to the ground, knowing that my life would never be the same again.” Waddle.

“One thing that well-prepared teams will have worked on is body language,” says Lyttleton, who also compiles a weekly penalty newsletter. “I noticed this in 2018: after Jordan Henderson missed (for England in the World Cup round-of-16 shootout) against Colombia, if you had seen him walking back to the group after that, you would not have been able to tell if he had missed or not.

“Compare this to the first penalty missed in a World Cup shootout, Uli Stielike in 1982 (West Germany vs France, semi-final) — he rolls into the foetal position on the penalty spot and has tears in his eyes when he walks back. That was a powerful image. It showed the world that the penalty has this power to reduce athletes to an infantilised state with one missed kick. How players respond to a miss is something to keep an eye on.”

Agony for Stielike in 1982, though the Germans went on to win that shootout with France (Ferdi Hartung/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

Shootouts are no longer viewed as a lottery. “Penalties weren’t something we practised much as a national side,” Southgate recalled. “We had great coaches, but it was seen as a matter of luck more than a skill.” When he reached the spot at Wembley that night in 1996, “rather than focus on the things I could control, like my breathing or what side of the net I should aim for, I started worrying about what might go wrong… my head was full of negativity.”

“I got away with it,” Paul Ince tells The Athletic.

Ince’s penalty against Argentina in 1998 does not resonate in the same way as Southgate’s two years earlier or those by Waddle and Pearce in 1990. Maybe there was a touch of English numbness by then, but those earlier failures were all in the semi-finals and this was just the last 16. And, in any case, there was another central moment.

“Everyone was talking about David Beckham’s sending off and we saw the ramifications of that when we came back home (the midfielder received death threats and an effigy of him was hung up outside a pub in London),” Ince says. “David Batty also missed after me. I’m glad it never defined me, but I don’t think missing a penalty should define anybody.

“With Gareth in 1996, we were at home and we had the feeling we were going all the way. You feel for the people in those circumstances but it doesn’t matter what you say to them, there’s no getting away from what they’re going through. You can say, ‘Forget about it, don’t worry’, but it doesn’t happen. It’s meaningless. I had a bit of that in France.

“We didn’t know who was going to take the penalties. It was like, ‘Who wants one?’. I’m not a natural penalty taker, but sometimes when you’re playing well you think, ‘Yeah, I’ll score’. I just had that confidence. I told myself to pick my spot and put it there. The keeper saved it. I only tend to look back when tournaments come around. I just think, ‘Should have put it to the other side’.

“It’s only afterwards it hits you. I remember coming out of the ground and Claire, my wife, and Thomas, my son, were there. He was only young and he was in tears, devastated. They were upset and so you become upset. You don’t want to see your kids cry. Maybe the Beckham situation meant it wasn’t such a big deal, but losing was. I still think with 11 men on the pitch (England played over 70 minutes, including extra time, a man short) we’d have won the game and then won the World Cup.”

Batty writes in his autobiography that he hasn’t “lost a single night’s sleep worrying” about his penalty, but Ince’s team-mate from 1998 is a man who never gave the impression of being consumed by the game. “Though my failure will probably go down as the most famous missed penalty in history, I look back with pride,” he said. And, “there are more important things in life”.

Darius Vassell (Portugal vs England, quarter-final, Euro 2004: missed) glosses over his decisive kick in his book. “I missed our seventh penalty of the shootout,” he says and that is pretty much it, although in an interview with Lyttleton, Ricardo, the Portugal goalkeeper, who promptly scored the winner, recalls Vassell looking “very nervous (before the kick) and he did not want to be there”.

Jamie Carragher (England vs Portugal, quarter-final, 2006 World Cup: missed) was “devastated to miss” the fourth and final penalty but as he sat with his team-mates after a familiar-feeling England defeat, he “didn’t feel the same emptiness I sensed in others”. He said: “One unshakeable overriding thought pushed to the forefront of my mind, no matter how much the rest of the nation mourned. ‘At least it wasn’t Liverpool’.”

Pearce was a warrior, but his 1990 miss in Turin tore at him. Beneath a towel thrown to him by team-mate Neil Webb, he was “sobbing my heart out”. In the dressing room, “there were a lot of tears. Myself, Chris Waddle and some of the others were sobbing”. On the team coach, he “cried all the way back to the hotel”. The following day, he was reunited with Liz, his wife, and his mum and dad, “and immediately filled up again”.

The following season, he endured a few chants of “Pearce is a German” by opposing fans but he had “taken something positive from that dreadful time and had by far my best season for (Nottingham) Forest; in fact, my best season in football”. Six years later, there was another shootout against Spain at Wembley and Pearce stepped up. Of course, he stepped up. Catharsis, purging, a deliverance…

Pearce wept after missing in 1990 but it was a different story six years later (Ben Radford/Allsport/Getty Images)

“For Stuart to have gone through that walk back to the centre circle, to come through the other end of that stress and pain… the bollocks, the nuts on that man to stand up again and then stick it away like he did… wow,” Shearer says.

Waddle did not get another chance — “Chris has to live with that pain forever,” Shearer says — and neither did Southgate, although there was a redemptive moment in Russia three years ago when, as England manager, he watched his young team overcome Colombia on penalties. He also showed his class; the sight of him embracing Mateus Uribe, who had missed Colombia’s fourth penalty, afterwards was poignant.

“There are no words to take away that feeling of complete desolation… friends who are a tower of strength reduced to rubble. Everywhere I looked was a scene of emotional devastation. Grown men, men’s men, weeping for what had happened, and what might have been.” Lampard.

“What happened will follow me around for a lifetime. It was the most important moment for the team, and for me, and I failed” — Simone Zaza (Germany vs Italy, quarter-final, Euro 2016: missed).

“It affected me for years. I still dream about it. Getting over that nightmare was difficult” — Roberto Baggio (Brazil vs Italy, final, 1994 World Cup: missed).

Gascoigne has a good line about Southgate, which he uses at talk-ins. “I scored my penalty fantastic and that was it,” he says. “Gareth misses his, he gets a £30,000 pizza advert and becomes manager of England. What’s wrong with this country?!”

In truth, Southgate was bereft. “I was the person who had ended a nation’s dream,” he wrote. “England’s loss was down to me.” In the depths of the old Wembley, he wept. “People held my shoulder and said it was OK, but I felt they were looking at me and thinking, ‘Christ, he’s cost us’.” He stopped to talk to journalists. “I feel I have let the entire country down,” he said, and that became the next day’s headline.

That night, England manager Terry Venables took Southgate to one side and spoke to him at length.

“He quoted (philosopher) Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’,” Southgate says.

And then there is a bleak statement (which may be a trigger for some). “There is another Nietzsche quote that, on reflection, might have been more appropriate,” Southgate writes. “’The thought of suicide is a great source of comfort: with it a calm passage is to be made across many a bad night’.”

Long after Southgate’s miss at Euro ’96, England is still waiting for football to come home (Stu Forster/Allsport/Getty Images)

In February 1997, Southgate was left out by Glenn Hoddle, the new England manager. It was the first time he had been dropped since making his name at Crystal Palace. “Tears began to well — not just from anguish but from relief,” he says. “At last, someone else had seen what I was going through.” He had “become frightened of playing for England, incapable of performing to my best,” he says. It was “as if I needed to punish myself”.

“The fallout from the missed penalty overwhelmed everything,” he says.

More recently, Southgate has written another book. Anything Is Possible offers leadership advice to young people. His humanity is a beacon.

Southgate admits his “experience in the Euro ’96 semi-final had almost stopped me from accepting the (England) job two decades on, because frankly, I didn’t want to get hurt again”, but he also speaks about the detail he poured into preparing for penalties.

“We used to consider the result to be a roll of the dice,” he says, but now, “We viewed the penalty shootout just like any other challenge. With a positive approach, plenty of practise and support for the players so they could improve and then master the skills”, they arrived at Russia 2018 “with confidence in our ability”.

When the time came against Colombia, “we focused on the process rather than the possible outcome”, mitigating against the wall and the walk. Winning that shootout “opened a new chapter in my life. Of course, I still wish that I had scored from the penalty spot as a player all those years ago, but I can honestly say that it changed me for the better”.

He explains further. “Missing my penalty made me more resilient and gave me a better perception of life. Over time, I came to realise that the worst thing that could happen in football was behind me. Nothing else could be as painful as that experience and knowing that became a motivating force. It encouraged me to understand myself better”.

Kilbane, too, is “reconciled,” to his 2002 miss. He can consider his career in its entirety. Quite rightly too, because he is a legend for his country and, like Pearce, Waddle and Southgate for England, he let nobody down. Let us down? They let us dream.

Still, though. There are moments.

“Whenever I’m out and about in Ireland, it would be mentioned,” Kilbane says. “Most of the time it’s in jest, a laugh — ‘Ah, I remember your penalty’. Things like that. In their mind, I’m sure it’s not malicious, but it’s still painful. And then the tournaments come around and it hits you in the stomach. It never goes.”

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(Top graphic – Photos by Getty Images; design by Sam Richardson)