gonzomax, check their stats here. That’s their official FIFA webpage, and you can find all their matches and get their statistics for shots, shots on goal, and goals. They didn’t chocke, that’s how they played. They were lucky in previous games that either they had possession of the ball most of the time, or that the goal attempts of the other teams were worse. Also, realize that the first goal they scored against Brazil was an autogoal, made by a Brazilian player. Had that not happened, the game dynamics probably would’ve been much different. The game should’ve been 0-0 or 1-1, since Brazil got a PK it didn’t deserve.
bucketybuck, they missed 3 penalty kicks, but two of those were directed on the net, and could have entered had the goalkeeper not done her job well (even with her leg) and blocked them. To ignore that is to ignore the worth of the Japanese goalkeeper, who did a lot of saves during the game.
Anyway, you can call the penalties whatever you want, but in the rest of the world we just say that they missed three of their penalties and move on with our lives. They didnt score the penalty, they missed the penalty. Thats how it is.
Perhaps I’m mistranslating from thinking in Spanish, but I meant that the first goal the US got in the Brazil match was scored by a Brazilian player. Hence, an “autogol” (the Brazilian team scored against itself).
BTW, I’m not defending the US team (I’m rooting for Japan), but perhaps we’re arguing semantics or whys here. Yes, they missed three penalties. I’m talking about why/how they missed it (and I think this is also what the other poster was mentioning). They could have missed all three because the goals were nowhere near the mark, and in fact, one of them was like that. The other two were missed because the goalkeeper did its job right.
It’s an argument against choking if they’re saying they choke because they couldn’t get through the net. Their kicks were fine, there was no fatigue in that. The goalkeeper guessed correctly and blocked them, which is, after all, part of soccer.
I believe that was me. I find it silly to pretend that this is not, in fact, a mechanism for winning the game. It’s a test of football skills (albeit a specialized subset) with representatives of the two teams pitted against each other. It determines exactly the same thing that would otherwise have been determined by a normal win–in this case, not merely advancement but the very championship.
That was me and I stand by it. Bayern were winning until injury time. in injury time they let in two goals from normal play, going from victory to defeat. Unlike a late equaliser such a display, especially in a final, is extremely rare.
For the same reason that ‘goals’ scored in a shootout are not added to the player’s tally for the tournament. It isn’t considered part of the game proper.
Most English speaking fans will have come across the name ‘auto goal’ when that Columbian player was murdered by criminals that had lost money on betting on the game, saying ‘thanks for the auto goal’ (well, that’s how it was often reported by people in the uk press) as he was shot.
It seems trivially easy to track the statistics for the different kinds of scoring, and the different categories of victory, independently. Absolutely no information about how the game was resolved need be lost by using the words “winning” and “won.”
Maybe it would be, but the fact remains that since it was first used, to replace the drawing of lots, winning a penalty shootout has not been the same as winning the game. Probably because it was brought in to replace something that definitely wasn’t based on footballing skill.
I just cannot agree that it was a case of the Bayern team choking. When I say “Choking”, it is because a player lets the mental pressure get to them to such an extent that they did not perform as they should. Say a golfer hits every green all year, but nerves make his hands shake so much in the final hole of the masters that he misses the green for the first time, then he choked.
In neither of Utd’s two goals against Bayern are there examples of obvious individual mistakes from any Bayern players. Instead what happened is that constant pressure from the Utd team simply paid off. The Bayern team played well and got hit by a sucker punch. That aint choking in my book, just sport.
Penalty kicks are rife with opportunities for people to “choke”, because the mental aspect is so important. No defenders coming at you, just you and all the time in the world to pick your spot. All the advantages lie with the kick takers, so if you actually do miss, then the only person to blame is yourself. This ties into why a saved penalty is considered a “missed” penalty. No matter how well a keeper does to kick out a leg and deflect the ball, she still should never have even had the chance to save it. There is a lot of goal there to hit, and if a penalty is taken right, not even the greatest keeper ever will be able to save it. So, if they do save it, its your fuckup.
Anybody can miss-hit a ball, but if you miss three out of four, then the only thing you can blame is your kicking technique or your mental fortitude. Nothing else.
Alright, OK already. Hey it surprised me too. But it wasn’t a USA team choke. Yes, you are correct insofar as those three shots were misses because they didn’t end up in the back of the goal-netting.
I was just responding to way that the tone of this thread was going (ie: the USA team were chokes because they didn’t convert three out of four shots). Fact is though, that’s only because two of them were saved by the keeper–and not just because they were weak shots that slowly rolled right to her.
In the context of our choking discussion here, I only see one of the shots as effectively being “missed”. Of the other two, one of them was a so-so attempt but good enough to score if the keeper hadn’t guessed right. The other was a fine spot kick and wasn’t converted only because of an outstanding save by Japan.
I know a bit about international football, but I’ll concede that I don’t know the ins and outs of the recording of official statistics. I do know that a shot on goal and a mere shot are accorded different levels of merit. In the spirit of this “choking vs. non-choking” thread I was only trying to say that the USA women did not choke on the spot kicks. One player did, and that’s it.
Yes. Thank you. It is the context I’m talking about here. Not merely the crude semantics of “If the penalty is not converted, then it is a miss.”
Look–people in this thread have used this whole “three misses in the penalty shootout” as a very weak attempt to make the assertion that the USA team choked. Such an assertion is made without the wherewithal to convincingly defend it. The game just didn’t go down like that.
Some folks are just not well-versed in the subtler aspects of the sport. One has to consider the circumstances and context. I believe these sorts of opinion indicate a certain lack of football sophistication on the part of the posters who offer them. Which isn’t even a big deal or an insult (just try discussing a suicide squeeze with a typical Englishman). The finer points of the game are not well understood here in the USA. No big deal… most Americans just aren’t exposed to top-level international football very often.
Everyone has a right to chime in with their opinions (and choke vs. non-choke is very much an opinion-based thing). But if you realize that you are not that attuned to the sport at this level, hey… maybe you can at least know when you’re out of your depth. (I am not specifically referring to any particular poster. Just making a general observation.)
Again I simply disagree. The keeper did well to react having already dived past the ball, but from the perspective of the taker, it was not a good penalty. Just left of center, about chest high, thats not a good place to put it.
The keeper made it look good, because when she picked her side to dive, she committed to it from when the ball was struck. She dived left, but the ball went more to center left. She showed great awareness to strike out with her trailing leg and deserves credit for that, but if she hadnt dived, but instead simply hopped sideways to the left and stuck out an arm, she also would have saved the penalty. Less spectacular, exact same kick from the taker, and I guarantee it would be classed as a poor shot.
You are free to find it as silly as you like, but the fact is… a penalty shootout is not part of the actual match. The match is over. It has ended in a draw. Done.
Try thinking of the spot kicks as as glorified version of the coin flips they used to use. You wouldn’t consider a coin flip a “specialized subset” of football skills, would you? You wouldn’t award a team a goal for winning a coin flip, right?
It’s merely a gussied-up way to determine who advances from the knock-out stages of a tournament, and it just happens to be based on an event that sometimes occurs in the normal course of a match (a penalty kick).
But “kicks from the penalty mark” don’t even have the same rules as normal penalty kicks. That’s why they aren’t called “penalty kicks”. After all, there was no penalty that led to the spot kick, hence there can be no goal scored on the kick itself, hence, the score can not change–it remains a draw. It is something entirely different from actual game-play that is not part of the match which has already ended.
Some people find parts of world football to be odd, silly, or downright ridiculous. Suit yourself. Maybe it just isn’t for you. Perhaps kickball would seem more sensible and orderly. I’ve heard it’s lots of fun.
I’ll admit I don’t totally disagree with your judgement of the overall effectiveness of the American’s kick. It could have been better placed. But I still don’t consider it a “choke.” That’s just my opinion on it.
By the way, bucketybuck… I certainly wasn’t referring to you went I offered my opinion that some people in this thread are… how shall I put it? Continuing to show their fogginess on the “deeper” parts of the game. (Don’t know if "deeper is really the right word here…)
I especially thought your post #119 was rather spot on, and demonstrates a solid and sane grasp of the game.
The event that everyone was there for was not “done.” They still, in fact, had the shootout, and that was the basis of the resolution. The basis for the championship! The distinction being made is merely one of how the real events, which everyone involved assigned immense importance to, are recorded.
What? No, because there is no skill there, obviously.
To be horribly crass, I understand you are from the US and from my quite large exposure to American sports (due to having American friends here), I know that draws are not common in sports there. I’m sorry, but I honestly believe this is a large part of your problem. You are struggling to accept that the game ended in a draw because that seems too unusual to you. You need resolution. I have grown up in the UK where we can play a game of cricket for five days and still call it a draw.
Simply, in other parts of the world we simply don’t see it the same way of you.
So what was determined by the shoot-out between the United States and Japan? Nobody “advanced” to anything.
For all the kvetching about whether the match ended in a draw or not, spark240’s fundamental point is correct; in the sense of who won the World Cup, the shoot-out was in any sense that mattered an extension of the match. Nobody advanced to anything; after the shoot-out, they gave the trophy to the Japanese team. Technically, you can say the match ended at extra time and that the shoot-out was a separate event, but for any practical purpose it was just a way of breaking the tie and was in effect an extension of the World Cup final.
It doesn’t make any PRACTICAL difference whether you say the match ended in a draw and is then decided by a separate event called a penalty shoot-out, or whether you say the penalty shoot-out is part of the preceding match. It’s the same event and the same result.
