{"id":3122,"date":"2018-07-05T19:55:07","date_gmt":"2018-07-05T18:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/?p=3122"},"modified":"2018-07-05T20:41:14","modified_gmt":"2018-07-05T19:41:14","slug":"the-trouble-with-penalties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/the-trouble-with-penalties\/","title":{"rendered":"The trouble with penalties"},"content":{"rendered":"

With England having a rare penalty win in the World Cup, John McGowan<\/a> considers what shoot-outs tells us about national prowess <\/em>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Though football is, perhaps briefly, looking like it’s coming home, until recently there seemed an inevitability about England bombing if a match came down to penalties. Now, not only have Columbia been vanquished from the spot, but manager\u00a0Gareth Southgate<\/a>\u00a0seems on the road to redemption following past ignominy. This could all end very abruptly of course, and spirits of Waddle, Pearce, Cole and Southgate (1996 version) may yet rise up again in pizza adverts<\/a> and infamy. We are all too familiar with\u00a0 pessimism, rising to inflated expectations, punctured by a lacklustre\u00a0performance. The the\u00a0curse<\/a>\u00a0<\/a>of<\/a>\u00a0<\/a>the<\/a>\u00a0<\/a>shoot-out may<\/a> yet strike again.\u00a0\u00a0Football, and penalties in particular, seem inextricable bound up with and English sense of being on top or, rather more frequently, a story of national decline.So is England’s penalty history a good guide to our national excellence?<\/strong><\/p>\n

An initial glance at the stats confirms England\u2019s\u00a0penalty\u00a0shoot-out\u00a0record<\/a>\u00a0is indeed poor. The worst in the current World Cup draw. To give some comfort, their overall win rate is significantly higher, but the high profile losses from the spot really bite. Their\u00a01982-2016 shoot-out win rate of 14% win has to square up to 33% for Italy, 50% for Ireland and France, 57% for Spain, 75% for Portugal and (this may hurt) 86% for traditional foes Germany.\u00a0South American titans Argentina and Brazil are both above 70%<\/a>. A further trawl through the stats suggests that England have, at points, been worse at penalties than Ethiopia (80%), Myanmar (50%), and The Seychelles (100%). OK there are some traditional footballing superpowers in there but\u00a0what about The Seychelles? Surely England are better than them? It\u2019s not like\u00a0days when\u00a0Glenn<\/a>\u00a0<\/a>Hoddle<\/a>\u00a0<\/a>was spouting karmic wisdom, hanging out with faith healers and disdaining\u00a0practice<\/a>. As a Scot I\u2019m dying to believe the \u2018England are shit at penalties\u2019 theory but another look at the figures forces me to admit that there may be more to it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not exactly news to point out that penalties contain an element of chance. No one really knows how much and factors from\u00a0age\u00a0to\u00a0national\u00a0character\u00a0have been suggested as influencing the outcome. The trouble is that we are tempted to find reasons other than chance for winning or losing. Reasons such as crude national stereotypes. The Germans (soulless efficiency), the Brazilians (samba flair ), and the Argentinians (lets not even go there). How satisfying are these explanations? I mean what do the Italians have that makes them better? Pasta and opera? And I\u2019m looking forward to reading about how the traditional fishing industry of the Seychelles lays the foundation for their stellar form.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s imagine for a second that the result of a shoot-out is pure chance. Where would that leave England\u2019s record? We might think the\u00a0law<\/a>\u00a0<\/a>of\u00a0<\/a>averages<\/a>\u00a0would apply and the outcomes would look random. A 50% win-rate right? Well actually wrong. The other trouble with those penalty stats is that they are all based on small numbers of matches. Often just four or five, and only one<\/a> for the mighty Seychelles. The trouble with truly random numbers is that, when you only have a few, they don\u2019t always\u00a0look\u00a0<\/em>random. When you throw a dice or flip a coin a few times the numbers or sides often don\u2019t come up\u00a0nearly<\/a>\u00a0<\/a>as<\/a>\u00a0<\/a>equally<\/a>\u00a0as you might expect.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The fact that we find it hard to believe that random things are really random can lead us into all sorts of bollocks.\u00a0\u00a0\u201c<\/a>Hot<\/a>\u201d\u00a0<\/a>numbers<\/a>\u00a0in the lottery (ones that seem to come up a lot) is a classic example but the same process can lead us to thinking that the outcome of penalty shoot-outs is determined by Teutonic discipline, Latin cunning or English decline.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So let\u2019s not get carried away about one match (though of course we will). England might\u00a0 or a road to national resurgence or a bunch of overpaid pretty-boys who crack under pressure. Equally however, they might simply be victims of the oddities of chance. On the more hopeful side some other\u00a0statistical<\/a>\u00a0<\/a>theories<\/a>\u00a0<\/a>suggest that, over a much larger number of events, random sequences will actually start to look a lot more like we expect (i.e. 10,000 coin flips might be likely to have a more even result than 10 flips). By that reckoning a few hundred more shootouts and England should have something close to a 50% record.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now that that really would be coming home.<\/strong><\/p>\n

An earlier version of this piece appeared\u00a0 in Viva Lewes magazine during the 2012 World Cup.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With England having a rare penalty win in the World Cup, John McGowan considers what shoot-outs tells us about national prowess . Though football is, perhaps briefly, looking like it’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5457,"featured_media":3145,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[657],"tags":[922,210,918],"class_list":["post-3122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-comment","tag-football","tag-sport","tag-statistics"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"authorName":"John McGowan","featuredImage":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/442\/2018\/07\/20160625-penalty-kick.jpg","postExcerpt":"With England having a rare penalty win in the World Cup, John McGowan considers what shoot-outs tells us about national prowess . Though football is, perhaps briefly, looking like it’s […]","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5457"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3122"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3173,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3122\/revisions\/3173"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}