Why everyone loves goalkeepers taking penalties

Penalty shootouts aren’t much fun for anyone. They represent the hopes and dreams of thousands or millions of supporters, and are as unbearable in their tension as teasing in their simplicity. Striker, ball, goalkeeper: football reduced to a pure form. But if it is bad for the fans, it is, of course, immeasurably worse for penalty takers. They aren’t only saddled with the responsibility of stepping up to the spot, but the expectation of scoring. And it’s precisely because of this latter burden that it is generally accepted that if you’re going to have to play a penalty shootout, you’re least likely to make yourself Public Enemy No. 1 as a goalkeeper.

Indeed, save a penalty, and you might actually start enjoying yourself. Lev Yashin -- who played for the Soviet Union between the 1950s and 1970s and is widely regarded as the greatest goalkeeper to ever play the game -- apparently saved close to 150 spot-kicks through his long career, and such was his pleasure in doing so that he beamed “the joy of seeing Yuri Gagarin flying in space is only superseded by the joy of a good penalty save.” (His pre-penalty advice was “to smoke a cigarette to calm your nerves and then take a big swig of strong liquor to tone your muscles,” though one can’t help but imagine that modern day sports scientists wouldn’t quite concur.)

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by the joy Gagarin derived from saving a penalty. After all, making a decisive shootout save allows goalkeepers to secure themselves a place in footballing history in a way that they otherwise find impossible. Think of the 2005 Champions League final, and you probably think of Jerzy Dudek dancing on the goalline; think of the 2008 Champions League final, and you probably (should) think of Edwin van der Sar making John Terry cry. It may well be no coincidence that Yashin, the penalty-saving master, is also the last keeper to have won the Ballon d’Or.

Suddenly the penalty shootout stops being torture and becomes every neutral supporter’s dream.

The seventeenth century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who generally had a pretty dim view of human nature, once concluded that “the passion of laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmities of others ... ” In short, one of the reasons we find things funny is because they make us feel superior to others. And hoping a professional athlete completely screws up in the most tense of all footballing situations is as good an example as any.

In actual fact, goalkeepers tend not to make themselves look any sillier than outfielders (especially Phil Jones, whose Bambi-esque spot-kick technique is oddly reminiscent of a pitching wedge). Some ruin the fun entirely by actually being so competent from dead-ball situations that they specialise in them, like one-time hat-trick hero José Luis Chilavert, or Rogério Ceni. But it’s the potential as much as the reality that is the cause for such delight. Of course, when people have to do things they don’t usually do, they tend to go wrong with more regularity.

It’s the novelty of a goalkeeper -- gloves, baggy shirts and all -- at the wrong end of the field, trying to score instead of save. It’s the same amusement one gets from watching Harry Kane doing a terrible impression of Hugo Lloris, or Manchester City needing a goal and Stuart Pearce sending David James up to try and find it (a decision that in retrospect should’ve probably indicated that he wasn’t cut out for a career in management). In these instances, things did go horribly wrong. Kane spilled a free-kick into his own goal; James spent his few minutes as an outfielder miscontrolling the ball and hoofing the poor Middlesbrough defenders instead.