The science of football - part 1

The first stage of SIT is called ‘conceptualisation’. The therapist helps the individual to identify their stressors and how they respond to these and how successful these responses have been. Patterns of self-defeating internal dialogue are identified. The players talk about their attitude towards penalties. One by one they vent out their frustration as the specialists note it down.

The second stage is ‘skill acquisition and rehearsal’. The therapist helps the individual to develop and practice positive coping statements to be used in stressful situations. Other techniques such as relaxation and making a realistic appraisal of situations are also practised. The specialists lecture them about the advantages of positivity. They remind them that a penalty is either won or lost when the player makes the dreaded walk towards the box from the team huddle. They are told to imagine and recreate the scenario in their mind, with the outcome always being a goal.

In the third stage ‘application and follow-through’ the individual begins to apply the newly acquired skills to progressively more difficult situations in the real world. The therapist provides support and further training when necessary.Now it’s all about practice. They imagine the scenario again, they enact it out without a ball, they enact it out without a goalkeeper and then finally enact it out with a goalkeeper over and over again until they are confident enough.

Slowly but surely the players take out the stress factor from their penalty taking ability.

David Beckham was the designated penalty taker for England

Now Geir Jordet is a psychologist who has done quite a few studies on penalties. An interesting one shows that players who waited longer to kick after the referee blows the whistle, perform better than ones who don’t. This study was done in 2009 by Jordet, Hartman and Sigmundstad. According to them most players rush their penalties as they are more worried about getting out of the stressful situation rather than scoring from it. This does indeed has detrimental effects on a player’s conversion rate.

The last statement was backed up in a different way by other researches. In a journal called Human Movement science, they found that players who focused on shooting at a particular area of the net were more likely to score than those who were previously told to just shoot at the side opposite to the goalkeeper. The point they make is that instead of dividing your concentration, focus it completely on scoring rather than expecting where the goalkeeper will jump. Lesser the targets, higher the efficiency.

Not just stress, but distractions seem to be quite dangerous to penalty takers. Goalkeepers do the “spaghetti or jelly legs” (Jerzy Dudek in 2005 against AC Milan, Petr Cech in 2012 against Lionel Messi), they point at different directions (van Der Sar in 2008 against Nicolas Anelka) , intimidated the penalty takers (Jens Lehmann in 2006 against Esteban Cambiasso) and do a lot more in a bid to distract penalty takers.

According to Greg Wood, a sports psychologist at Exeter University, during a highly stressful situation, players are more likely to be distracted by any threatening stimuli and focus on them rather than the task in hand. For this very reason, psychologists have helped a lot of footballers (especially frequent penalty takers) with what they call ‘tunnel vision’ .Now tunnel vision is a term used when a player is successfully able to block out everything except the target from his senses. In the biggest of arenas, penalty takers are distracted by a number of threatning stimuli. Fans are chanting and screaming out at them, boo’s are echoing, deregotary terms are shouted out and just about everything you would want to avoid in a stressful situation.

As always there are exceptions and there is one which predicts that stress could be a good thing, up to a certain level. The Yerkes-Dodson law is an empirical relationship between arousal and performance. According to the law, players should feel a mild amount of stress or ‘arousal’ to increase performance as the player concentrates more. However there doesn’t seem to be much proof behind it and it remains to be just a viable ‘worst case scenario’ solution.