In a spot of bother: Life before and after a missed penalty

83rd minute of a World Cup Semi Final. The captain of the England Football team, Harry Kane puts the ball on the spot as his team trails by a single goal. He embraces the moment. A look of conviction, assurance and also a bit of stress in his focused eyes. As the millions of fans hold their breath in the cold streets of London, Manchester and also Paris, Kane awaits the referee's whistle - the chance to fight for the biggest prize in football is at stake. 

Kane steps ups. 

Kane kicks the ball to Mars.

England lose. 

Football did not come home. 

In 1994, the Italians were at ease knowing that their finest player of the tournament, Roberto Baggio, was taking that dreaded lonely walk from the halfway line to kick the ball, which was supposed to keep Italy alive in the world cup final. 

He missed.

The mystery of why certain athletes can remain composed under pressure and perform while others cannot, still  persists. How do sportsmen perform in circumstances that are so tense that even the spectators are too nervous to watch? Why is it that some sportsmen can do the seemingly unachievable when everything is on the line? 

And how do they feel in the aftermath of 'messing it up' in a do or die situation?

Remember the night of 23rd/24th March in 2016? While you awaited the all but certain moment to celebrate knocking India out of a home world cup, Mushfiqur Rahim and Mahmudullah Riyad messed it all up. Sheer joy turned to utter misery and disgust. It created a wound that the most expensive of laser surgeries could never remove. 

Mushfiqur Rahim will take that moment of failure to his grave. So will Baggio. Harry Kane will remember that penalty miss for the rest of his life even if he never misses another one in his glorified career. 

 But why do our favourite players falter, you ask? 

Two words. Sports Psychology. Let's dive a bit deeper into it, shall we?

Why athletes choke under pressure

To relate to what Harry Kane or Roberto Baggio went through before taking their penalties, we have to delve deeper into the state of their minds. That is, the state of an athlete's mind under pressure. 

Performing under pressure necessitates having the ability to selectively attend to information and to swiftly focus and broaden our attention. However, anxiety often impairs our capacity for information processing, which ultimately affects our performance.

According to CUE Utilization Theory, the reason anxiety can be detrimental to performance is because as anxiety increases, our attention narrows and our abilities to process information become momentarily impaired. In important moments, when we feel pressure, an increase in our anxiety levels can narrow our attention to the point where we miss relevant important information.

According to renowned sports psychologist Rudi V. Webster anxiety spoils performance by causing tension and stiffness in muscles and heaviness in the limbs, impairment of fine motor skills and hand eye coordination, impaired judgment and poor selection, perceptual distortion - making mountains out of molehills, fear, and emotions like frustration and disappointment.

For instance, a basketball player's ability to shoot the ball becomes second nature to them after extensive practice. A player's focus, however, can become so focused that they overthink the movement rather than allowing it to come naturally while under pressure and feeling more anxious. Their concentration narrows to consciously instruct their limb to shoot the ball, disrupting the automated process, rather than focusing where they wish to shoot the ball.

The goal is to find an optimal level of anxiety - one where we are not too relaxed and distracted by irrelevant information, and one where we are not too anxious where our attention narrows to miss important information.

The optimal state is where the athletes distract themselves from the distraction of the screaming fans, and focus on the location where they want to shoot the ball. But they should not narrow the attention down to a granular level so that it is occupied by consciously trying to perform a movement that they have naturally mastered.

In moments such as Harry Kane's penalty, ability takes a back seat to psychology. This is what former England striker Alan Shearer wrote about Harry Kane's penalty miss on The Athletic.

"Sure, this was not a "normal" penalty and you have the long, dreaded walk from the halfway line to contend with, but even so, the technique and discipline are the same as they always are. But having taken one already, the difference was the difference itself. It becomes a mind game, not only with the goalkeeper but with yourself. It's human nature. Who blinks first? To me, Harry looked weighed down for his second. Heavier, somehow."

"In that situation, you're confronted with a new set of problems and a new set of siren voices. You think 's***, what do I do now? Do I do the same as last time, do I stick with what I'm good at, do I change it up?' I converted mine, but in Harry's case, he's playing against his Tottenham Hotspur team-mate in Hugo Lloris and that sense of familiarity is treacherous. Yes, he'd already scored, but Lloris knows his routines, how he practises, the side he naturally favours."

"Trust me, all that plays on your mind in the sparse seconds between the whistle going and you starting your run-up."

According to Dr. Geir Jordet, a Norwegian sport psychologist, penalty kicks to avoid defeat in a World Cup shootout are much harder to score, with a conversion rate of just 62% as opposed to 92% when kicking to win the shootout. This is because players of "high status" (those who have won individual awards) are under more pressure due to higher expectations.

"Only those who have the courage to take a penalty miss them," Roberto Baggio famously said.

Living with the moment

The aftermath of what an athlete goes through after such mistakes is not just 'science'. It's a normal human reaction, normal trauma that you and I may go through anytime. It's a burden they carry through their entire lives. 

Harry Kane knows it. He knew it long before he said, "it's something I will have to live with" to BBC in a post-match flash interview. He knew it at the final whistle when he dropped down on his haunches. He knew when he saw the ball sailing over the crossbar.

"I've never told anyone this before, but I still think about that penalty. That day, football broke my heart," said Roberto Baggio in an interview in 2017.

It's as if you were driving and just happened to run a scurrying animal over. You probably never had an accident before. You probably will not ever get into another one in the future as well. But that mistake will always remain. It will haunt you in your sleep and eat you up and there's nothing you could do to change it.

Maybe that's why even over a decade after retiring, Alan Shearer says in reference to a missed penalty against Sunderland that, "I still wake up thinking about that miss."

These feelings never truly leave you. That's the weight they carry.

As fans and analysts, we look for answers. We ask ourselves, "why did he miss it?"

We look for reasons. Was it a lack of preparation? Was it wrong technical execution? 

CBS Sports pundit and former English footballer Nigel Reo-Coker said, "No matter what they say about practicing, and how these clubs go in and practice so that they're mentally ready, it's all cobblers. It's never the same as it is on gameday, after playing 120 minutes worth of football. It's never the same. When you pick up that ball, that lonely walk to the goal, the goal just shrinks with every step you take, your legs are heavy like you're wearing concrete boots, and it becomes the hardest thing in the world."