The famed Italian striker Roberto Baggio didn’t just miss his shot in the penalty shoot-out for the World Cup Final in 1994, he looped it high over the bar like a schoolboy novice, making Brazil world champions.
True, the midday sun had heated the unshaded Rose Bowl field in Pasadena to a throbbing near 40 degrees and the teams faced each other through a shimmering heat haze. But heat and match conditions could not account for Baggio’s mistake. There was only one explanation: pressure.
Sport is a great laboratory of human behaviour, but a penalty shoot-out – along with competition golf – offers the best opportunity to observe performance under pressure. That pressure is of course highest on the penalty-taker because it’s so easy to punt a ball into a huge goal – any player can do it most of the time. Goalkeepers are under less pressure because it is so hard to protect 18 square metres of space and they are heroes if they succeed.
But taking a penalty mirrors much of life – successful execution is assumed but failure leads to opprobrium. After his failed shot, Baggio famously stood stock-still, head down, leading to him being described as “the man who died standing”.
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But goalkeepers feel pressure too, particularly when their team has missed more penalties than their competitor. Penalty-takers like Baggio kick right and left equally often on average and goalkeepers dive accordingly. Except, that is, when their team is losing in the shoot-out count. Under this pressure, goalkeepers are more likely to dive right than left, Marieke Roskes and colleagues at the University of Amsterdam have shown.
This is because the motivation to win – so-called “approach motivation” – activates the left front part of the brain, gearing them for the reward of winning by focusing all their attention on achieving the task in hand, namely saving the penalty. The greater activity of the left side of the brain biases action to the right side.
This explains Roskes’s finding that in Fifa World Cup matches ending in penalty shoot-outs, goalkeepers whose teams were losing dived to the right – the kicker’s left – 71 per cent of the time versus 29 per cent left, while goalkeepers whose teams were ahead dived right 48 per cent versus left 52 per cent of the time. The lesson for the penalty-takers in this week’s semi-finals is clear: if your team is ahead on the shoot-out scoreboard, kick to the right, the goalkeeper’s left.
But doing something simple that you have done thousands of times before is not so easy with the hot breath of 80,000 watchers on your neck, not to mention the millions of your countrymen and women who will benefit from the surge in economic activity, social cohesion, national pride and international prestige if you just tap that ball into the goal – something you can do so easily when there is little pressure.
If tomorrow night’s semi-final culminates in a shoot-out, watch out for the player who steps forward with apprehension in his face, who takes too much time before kicking or who walks up to the ball too slowly. He’s more likely to do a Roberto Baggio kick, because these are signs that his mind lacks a single focus and that the possibility of failure has found a corner of his mind to roost in, where its fluttering will disrupt networks of connected brain cells where the kicking skills are stored.
This is what happened to golfer Pádraig Harrington when, on the brink of winning the British Open in 2007, he goofed two balls in succession into the river. In allowing himself to think of the glory of winning the Claret Jug, he opened up the gates of his attention from the immediate task in hand – just driving the ball up the fairway as he had done so easily tens of thousands of times before.
But by allowing himself to become excited – and also nervous at the prospect of disappointment and failure – his brain released an excess of the neurotransmitter noradrenaline, which unsettled the well-practised networks that otherwise automatically performed easily when the brain-weather system was less aroused and more settled.
Harrington’s caddie Ronan Flood settled that weather system by drilling the words “you are the best chipper and putter in the world” over and over again into the golfer’s brain as they walked up the fairway to take the second penalty shot. He hacked into Harrington’s brain’s operating system, taking control of its attention so that it just had a single, limited focus uncontaminated by big thoughts of success or failure – just chipping and putting.
And it worked – Harrington beat Sergio Garcia in a playoff and won the big prize. But he only did so, paradoxically, by forgetting the big prize through controlling what he paid attention to: just the next task in hand, chipping the ball.
And this is what penalty takers must do too, of course. They must use their attention to just focus on the task in hand – kicking the ball into the net – narrowing mental focus to exclude all the big thoughts of glory or defeat. Which, of course, is what all of us have to learn to do in life more generally when the pressure is on – just focus on the next task.
Ian Robertson is a neuropscyhologist and author of How Confidence Works
Source: The Irish Times
