Oh yes nerve plays a big part, no doubt. But it does wind me up when pundits say that ‘you can’t practise penalties’. This was a bit of a cliché with pundits on British TV but of course practice helps. If it didn’t then why would teams bother training at all? Good technique and practice should help to fight against the nerves/pressure.
Of course you’re technically right, in fact you can train the techniques and even the little mind games between the keeper and the shooter, especially if you set up little bets with your teammates for donations to the team kitty to create a little pressure. But as so often, there’s a kernel of truth in the cliché: you really can’t simulate a player’s psychological pressure when they are the last shooter in a shoot-out who can decide a WC final, exhausted by 120 minutes of intense play, in front of 80,000 people, half of them whistling and booing you, and half the world watching on the telly.
True, yet there are teams that historically do better in shootouts than others. Up until a few years ago, weren’t the German men near-invincible in shootouts while the English men were infamously bad at them? I don’t know what tactics they were using in training but surely there was something making one better than the other.
Yeah, that’s both a cliché and mostly the truth, at least for the German and English national (men’s) teams. It didn’t help that England lost two times in quite a short time to Germany in penalty shoot-outs, in the 1990 WC and again at their home turf, in the 1996 Euros. We (Germans) still find the trope of English penalties funny, though we should have stopped laughing by now after the last few tournaments…We are not the unrelenting “panzers” (as the British yellow press still nicely likes to call us) anymore.
A little sidetrack on the history of PK shoot-outs for the German national team: in fact we have a very positive statistic, we won 6 out of 7 shoot-outs in the WC or Euros. But most people forget that we lost the first ever final decided by penalties, the Euro final 1976 against then Czechoslovakia, with two of the most iconic penalty kicks in German football history. Ulrich Hoeneß’ “Schuss in die Wolken” (shot to the clouds) and Panenka’s formerly unseen trick penalty that brought the decision, the coolest penalty ever. To this day this trick is called a “Panenka” in Germany, and probably also in Czechia.
It’s known as that in England too. It’s probably the greatest penalty of all time. The brass balls he had to do that… magnificent!
Netherlands going into the match against Spain as serious underdogs. DvdD being out is going to really hurt the Orange Lionesses, I fear. They are already missing Meidema.
I guess at this point I’m pulling for England or Australia.
England <–My mom is from there
Australia <–hey, they are co-hosting and it’d be great for them to win
I’m rooting for Jamaica, if alone for the fact that Bob Marley’s daughter Cedella crowdfunded/fundraised for the Jamaican women’s team (because they were inadequately supported by their national association) and thus made their qualification for the WC possible in the first place.
There is no language I know where it is not called the Panenka. Against Sepp Meier, no less! That took some guts.
Rooting for Jamaica sounds fine, are they complete outsiders, like in that movie about bobsleigh?
Sepp Maier was a fine, even world-class keeper, but there’s ONE thing he was not famous for: stopping penalties. He has never stopped a penalty in his life, Panenka’s just was the most embarrassing.
Oh, dear, and I can’t even write his name correctly! My very bad… sorry!
No need to apologize, given the myriad ways of spelling the name Maier, Meier, Mayer, Meyer, Mair, Mayr… 
Watching Lauren James stomping on that Nigerian player, I still can’t figure out why athletes do these things when they know there are millions watching on TV and that cameras are filming everything from every angle. How do they think they’ll get away with it?
Doch!
My wife’s name is Mayer, and she does not like it at all when people write it any other way, go figure. I won’t tell her.
They don’t think at all in that moment, they act affectively. And don’t forget that people got away much easier and more often in the times when there weren’t 50 high-res cameras pointed at them, but maybe four, and there wasn’t a thing like the VAR. Nasty, hidden fouls (does anybody remember Gascoigne getting his balls squeezed? I don’t remember who was the perpetrator) and dives were much more common then.
I’m also rooting for Jamaica, but I’m also rooting for Colombia… so that’s a bit annoying… after that… Japan perhaps.
Hah, that’s funny! I read that thread a few days ago and only a few hours ago thought about it and asked myself if I should post there and explain the meaning of “doch”. I would have explained it almost exactly like you, only without the sidetrack to French in which I’m definitely not as firm as you. Thanks for doing my work there. 
And thanks to you for linking both threads. Well, that was a nice coincidence, wasn’t it? Just 30 minutes apart. Thanks too for putting the right response on a silver plate for me, I had counted on you writing I should not mind and of course you did not disappoint me. A true gentleman.
ETA: I have added indeed as a translation. It sometimes works. They asked for concision? It doesn’t get any conciser.
I see the final is at 6AM eastern USA time, which is where I live.
I may have to drag myself out of bed for it(I am a teacher on summer vacation).