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Friday, May 27, 2005

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Shootouts: Unjust but compelling

Soccer's penalty solution may be an aching one, but still the best, writes Rohit Brijnath

The greatest profanity for a soccer fan is an admission that the penalty shootout is actually rather fun. Such blasphemers are seen as bereft of any aesthetic sense and traitors to tradition. As Brian Glanville, wrote of the 1994 World Cup final, "penalties it would be, a dire, disgraceful and dishonourable conclusion to the game's greatest competition".

Drama of the damned

So it is with head hung low that I profess to not being totally averse to this drama of the damned, which reared its head in yesterday's Champions League final and last week's FA Cup final. Shootouts are not fair apparently, but since when has sport been?

The shootout appears an unfitting conclusion to grand contests, like yesterday's pulsating AC Milan-Liverpool final. It was a game alive with ingenuity, imagination, strength of sinew and of character, advertising keenly so many of soccer's fine virtues, not least of them the valour that propels comebacks. None of this would be found in a description of the shootout.

The shootout is a practical invention in a game of the heart, a fast food end to a five-course meal. Schedules are overcrowded and replays are not always possible, though in a World Cup final an exception is probably required.

Shootouts are routinely described as lotteries, where success is determined less by design than chance.

It seems to rebel against the soul of the game, its free-flowing majesty reduced to a static contest, a team sport improbably condensed into a duel between individuals. One hundred and twenty minutes of imagination is finally decided by a goalkeepers' guesswork.

All this is unarguable, but still there is a heightened, almost unbearable, tension to the shootout, like yesterday's, and this is sport, too — you want to look away, but you can't. Russian roulette comes to mind.

Swift prayers sit on lips, fans will link arms, as will teams, as if their joint spirit will somehow flow into the man who is taking the next penalty. Before it starts, goalkeepers will be kissed luck on their journeys by team-mates; goalkeepers will also embrace each other, for no one but they understand this private hell.

Nerve is everything here, or is it? A commentator once said you can never practise for the moment, to which Gary Lineker argued does that mean Tiger Woods honing his short putts every day is for nothing. Perhaps it is a bit of both, and some coaches have their players bet on the outcome in practice to recreate the pressure. As if.

Men take the long walk to the spot as if approaching a hanging, often their own. Out here, ask Robert Baggio, reputations count for nothing. Some kick left, others right, those with chutzpah kick straight. Some blast, others feint with their hips and chip. When players miss, stomachs lurch, tears fall and cries of the devil's work abound. In 1984, when Liverpool won last, goalkeeper Bruce Grobelaar almost did a drunk's impersonation on the line. Yesterday, Liverpool's Dudek, as if to both distract and make his goal seem smaller, waved his arms, danced, jinked, and even, illegally, came way off his line, but it worked.

Thrilling

Penalty shootouts may not be satisfying but they are thrilling, not footballing justice perhaps but compelling theatre. Neither golden goal nor silver has really worked and playing on is no guarantee of a result. The absurd suggestion of pulling off a player from each team every five minutes after regulation time is an even greater embrace of gimmickry. Soccer's penalty solution may be an aching one, but still the best one.

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