Cruelty, Randomness, and Penalty Kicks

Stefan Kiessling squatted over the spot with tears in his eyes. After Jan Oblak, the man who dove across the goalline as Kiessling thwacked his match-losing shot high over the crossbar, escaped a mob of exultant teammates, he walked over to his colleague and held the striker's shoulders firmly with his goalkeeper's mitts. He attempted to make a connection with Kiessling and explained in broken German or English what Kiessling will come to understand in time: that he had just played in an extraordinary match, that penalty kicks are a crapshoot, that someone had to screw up, and that, unfortunately, it was him.

Oblak offered his condolences to Kiessling because a shootout engenders empathy between two sets of players who were previously trying to take each other's heads off for 120 minutes. This is what Kiessling's Bayern Leverkusen teammates and Oblak's Atleti ones had been doing on Tuesday, until that missed kick mercifully and mercilessly ended the game.

It is not fair; it is not fair; it is not fair. Penalties are a cruel way to conclude a match, but they're necessary. Even the most well-conditioned athletes can only do so much running, and extra periods often have the clammy and defeated feel of a lone diner trying to persevere through the last six ounces of a porterhouse for two. Players cramp; mistakes abound. The soccer breaks down and borders on farcical. It must end, via one method or another. Solitary strikes from 12 yards are the solution we've settled on. It's a good one. It's also a harrowing one.

Penalties seem, at their outset, both impossible to miss and impossible to convert. There are competing conventional wisdoms about what the taker should do: hit it hard, pick a spot, read the keeper. They all work and they all don't; as any baseball pitcher will tell you, sometimes a burrowing curveball gets slapped into right field; sometimes a meatball fizzes past the batter. Your best shit is only as good as your opponent's best shit.

The strangeness of the penalty is rooted in this baseball-ification of soccer. A team game at once becomes a duel between two players, one of whom has nothing to lose and one of whom is trying with all his might not to make the wrong decision. That is the word commentators use—"decision"—as if the movements of the body are perfect but for the meddling mind, which is, upon an unsuccessful penalty, split between hitting the ball to the left of the keeper or straight down the middle.

There are certainly strikes from the spot that suffer from the taker altering what he wants to do between his penultimate and final stride, but more often than not, his mechanics are off. He hits the ball in the wrong spot. The ideal shot is unsaveable, from such a distance. If every player could execute this dream-like maneuver, shootouts would last eternities.

That they don't is a function of nerves and the fact that most teams have only a few players who are competent from the spot. Atleti threw out Mario Suárez, a bruising holding midfielder. Bayer used ?-mer Toprak, a center back. The former confidently placed the ball in the right side of the goal, and the latter swagtastically biffed his shot. Leverkusen's manager Roger Schmidt said after the loss that he "wanted [his] good penalty takers at the start and at the end." He then chuckled. "It didn't work."

That sad laugh from Schmidt is the sad laugh of every manager who has stood on the sidelines as his players screwed the pooch in five parts. Schmidt knows what's up: you put the names on the sheet and hope for the best. Penalties are upset stomachs and hastily slugged beers and second-guesses and cowering with your head in your hands, like you're not sure what god to pray to. That is just the onlookers. The players must feel sicker.