Here I wish to draw attention to just
seven of them. Messi missed a penalty in Barca’s semi-final match against
Chelsea in the 2011-12 edition of the Champions League, Ronaldo and Kaka of
Real Madrid missed their penalties against Bayern Munich during the penalty
shootout in the other semi-final, and Robben of Bayern Munich missed a penalty
in the first half of extra time in the final match of the same tournament
against Chelsea. Barca, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich all lost those crucial
matches. These players who broke their supporters’ hearts are the regular
penalty takers of their respective teams. They failed when it mattered most. And
not to forget that Kaka (2007), Ronaldo (2008) and Messi (2009 – 11) have all
been winners of the World Player of the Year award. In the 2007-8 edition of
the same tournament, Lampard, again the regular penalty-taker of his team,
Chelsea, lost his penalty in the shoot out in the final match, and Chelsea lost
to Manchester United.
FIFA World Cup Finals is a far
more popular and spectacular event. The quality of football may in general be a
shade less exciting than in the Champions League, but here teams represent
countries, and the dreams of their countrymen. People forget their daily grind
and their miseries and celebrate their team’s success, and plunge into
collective grief if it fails. Inspired by a sense of nationalism players in the
field and the spectators in the stadium and television viewers and people at
home forget their club loyalties for a while. Playing for Portugal, and one may
think with his career, Cristiano Ronaldo, in the 2006 World Cup, had a role in
the red-carding of his Manchester United club mate Rooney, who was playing for
England. And it was a delight to see the people of Spain rising above their
fierce club loyalties and celebrating their team’s winning the World Cup in
2010 for the first time. Hardly does any sporting event arouse such strong emotions as does World
Cup finals.
Missing a penalty here can be
heartbreaking. Brazilian Zico, who, it was said, had scored about 200 goals
from penalties by then, failed to score from the spot in his team’s quarter
final match against France in the second half. The match went into penalty
shoot out. Zico scored, but it did not redeem him since he was seen as
responsible for bringing the match to the shootout stage. On the other hand, Socrates failed to
score in the shoot out but it did not matter to anyone, as people, it seems, generally to fail
to see the penalty shoot out as a condensed version of a match, which
it indeed is. Incidentally, what the French captain did when Zico missed the
penalty was tender and graceful and brought repute to the game - Platini
gave a comforting touch to Zico. One rarely sees such grace on the field.
Roberto Baggio made a huge
contribution in Italy’s being in the final in the 1994 World Cup. The match was
rather uninteresting, and Brazil was clearly the better team. The match ended
goalless and went into penalty shoot out. Baggio’s took the last penalty and
shot over the bar and Brazil won the World Cup after twenty four long years.
Baggio, Messi and Ronaldo had
contributed greatly to their teams’ going that far in the relevant tournaments.
And each had the mortification to see his effort go waste as he failed to score
from the spot when it mattered most. After their loss to Bayern Munich,
Casilas, the goal keeper-captain of Real Madrid, consoled his team, saying
“Penalties are all a lottery.”
Scoring a penalty goal and
stopping a penalty kick call for high level skills, practice, mind game tactics
and imagination, at least at the highest level of football. But often a penalty goal is less valued than
a “pure goal”, a field goal. If a player scores a creditable number of goals in
a tournament, both the connoisseur and the debunker ask the same question as to
how many of those goals are from the spot - it is like asking, in the case of a
cricketer who has scored, say, twelve thousand runs in Test cricket, how many
of these have been scored against the minnows. One gets no credit for scoring
from the penalty spot, and gets all the discredit for failure to score. Missing
a penalty is news, hitting the net from the spot is not. As for the goal keeper,
he is hardly ever blamed if the ball goes in, but his heroic effort in stopping
the ball is almost always attributed to his being lucky, so he gets at most a faint
word of praise. Does anyone remember Bats who stopped Zico’s shot? Robben will be remembered for his failure but Cech will be forgotten although he was the cause of it. And to think as a
boy Camus played football as the goalkeeper. Thanks to his grandmother!
