Shoot-outs hit the spot every time
By Jim White
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/mai...10/sfntv10.xml
Last week, as Liverpool slipped past Chelsea in the Champions League semi-final, Clive Tyldesley called the penalty shoot-out that decided the tie "a fairground sideshow". How disappointing, he sighed, that two heavyweight contenders so evenly matched were obliged to sort it out by the sporting equivalent of tossing a coin. Serendipity rather than skill would be the winner. Chance not application the deciding factor. Somehow it seemed to diminish the whole process.
It is the conventional wisdom that the shoot-out is a debased form of competition, one that everyone involved in the game - managers, players, pundits and commentators alike - routinely describe as akin to the plague, something we all hope to avoid. Except, that is, those of us watching on television. For us the shoot-out is a joy, a mini-drama as full of incident as an entire year of EastEnders. It is a season's worth of agony and ecstasy condensed into one easily digested gobbet: sport for the three-minute attention span. How we love it.
This week sees the start of the shoot-out season, the climax to nine months of slog and toil, the time of year when all sorts of issues are settled by the unholy lottery of 12-yard roulette. Marvellous. It really doesn't matter right now who is playing, or at what level they are engaged, virtually every night on the telly there is someone going through the whole ghastly process for our enjoyment. If only the schedulers could let us know in advance when one is likely to happen, we could spare ourselves the 120 minutes of drudgery that almost invariably precedes it.
Take Tuesday night's Conference play-off semi-final between Oxford United and Exeter City. Not an appointment that would have had many reaching for their diary, especially as the first leg last Friday had been a serious contender for the worst football game ever televised live, a woeful procession of underhit passes and hopeful hoofs, concluded by a chance missed by Oxford's Chris Zebroski that my granny could have converted. And she died 25 years ago. Yet the second leg was concluded by a shoot-out that reached out of the screen and grabbed you by the throat every bit as effectively as anything England have conjured up.
It was one of those rare occasions when I was present in the ground and could then compare my reactions by watching again on Sky Plus. If anything, the television recording offered more from the shoot-out (and that is not solely because you could spin through the game itself at 30 times normal speed). In the stadium, what you experience is mostly the fat bloke next to you leaping around when his team score, then, when they miss, loudly complaining - from his elevated moral station of at least five stone overweight - about their all-round uselessness. Watching on the television, though, you get to see it all, from at least 15 different Sky camera angles.
The remarkable thing about shoot-outs is that, no matter what the level, everyone behaves in exactly the same way. There is a learnt pattern of behaviour that infects participants the moment it boils down to this.
The two teams line up on the halfway line, their arms wrapped round each other in solidarity. The penalty taker walks slowly to the spot, trying to exude calm but with a strange waddle that betrays his nerves. The goalkeeper then delays things by walking forward to make an ostentatious show of examining the ball. The commentator then remarks how this is the time for one of them to be a hero. Behind the goal, several dozen youths gurn wildly in an attempt to put the taker off. If he scores, he leaps in the air and shouts "come on" angrily. If he misses, it is the goalie who does the leaping, while the misser walks back to his team-mates, head down, trying to appear sanguine but wholly unable to control the wobble on his bottom lip.
When this has run its course over five, or in the case of Tuesday's game, six penalties per side, the winners form an ecstatic human pyramid, with the goalkeeper at its base and the reserve centre-back, who has only played twice all season, resplendent in his club blazer on the very top, milking the fans' applause. The losers, meanwhile, sink to their haunches and contemplate a contract advertising pizzas (though probably not in the Conference). The camera then picks out fans in the winners' section losing all sense of decorum, contrasting their insanely happy looks with the fat bloke among the losers, who is sitting glum-faced, tears coursing down his cheeks, texting home to tell them how useless his team were.
"That it should come to this," the commentator intones. "Surely there's a better way to decide a whole season than this?" A better way? Give over. We wouldn't miss this for the world.
================================================== ========
What do you guys think? I personally favour the return of the golden goal (Macca!!
), as the shoot-out gives me a serious heart failure. It is also fair to both sets of fans. I know we have been successful in our last 3 major shoot-outs, but imagine us losing all 3? It could've gone either way if our peno-takers bottled it in that fragment of a second.
By Jim White
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/mai...10/sfntv10.xml
Last week, as Liverpool slipped past Chelsea in the Champions League semi-final, Clive Tyldesley called the penalty shoot-out that decided the tie "a fairground sideshow". How disappointing, he sighed, that two heavyweight contenders so evenly matched were obliged to sort it out by the sporting equivalent of tossing a coin. Serendipity rather than skill would be the winner. Chance not application the deciding factor. Somehow it seemed to diminish the whole process.
It is the conventional wisdom that the shoot-out is a debased form of competition, one that everyone involved in the game - managers, players, pundits and commentators alike - routinely describe as akin to the plague, something we all hope to avoid. Except, that is, those of us watching on television. For us the shoot-out is a joy, a mini-drama as full of incident as an entire year of EastEnders. It is a season's worth of agony and ecstasy condensed into one easily digested gobbet: sport for the three-minute attention span. How we love it.
This week sees the start of the shoot-out season, the climax to nine months of slog and toil, the time of year when all sorts of issues are settled by the unholy lottery of 12-yard roulette. Marvellous. It really doesn't matter right now who is playing, or at what level they are engaged, virtually every night on the telly there is someone going through the whole ghastly process for our enjoyment. If only the schedulers could let us know in advance when one is likely to happen, we could spare ourselves the 120 minutes of drudgery that almost invariably precedes it.
Take Tuesday night's Conference play-off semi-final between Oxford United and Exeter City. Not an appointment that would have had many reaching for their diary, especially as the first leg last Friday had been a serious contender for the worst football game ever televised live, a woeful procession of underhit passes and hopeful hoofs, concluded by a chance missed by Oxford's Chris Zebroski that my granny could have converted. And she died 25 years ago. Yet the second leg was concluded by a shoot-out that reached out of the screen and grabbed you by the throat every bit as effectively as anything England have conjured up.
It was one of those rare occasions when I was present in the ground and could then compare my reactions by watching again on Sky Plus. If anything, the television recording offered more from the shoot-out (and that is not solely because you could spin through the game itself at 30 times normal speed). In the stadium, what you experience is mostly the fat bloke next to you leaping around when his team score, then, when they miss, loudly complaining - from his elevated moral station of at least five stone overweight - about their all-round uselessness. Watching on the television, though, you get to see it all, from at least 15 different Sky camera angles.
The remarkable thing about shoot-outs is that, no matter what the level, everyone behaves in exactly the same way. There is a learnt pattern of behaviour that infects participants the moment it boils down to this.
The two teams line up on the halfway line, their arms wrapped round each other in solidarity. The penalty taker walks slowly to the spot, trying to exude calm but with a strange waddle that betrays his nerves. The goalkeeper then delays things by walking forward to make an ostentatious show of examining the ball. The commentator then remarks how this is the time for one of them to be a hero. Behind the goal, several dozen youths gurn wildly in an attempt to put the taker off. If he scores, he leaps in the air and shouts "come on" angrily. If he misses, it is the goalie who does the leaping, while the misser walks back to his team-mates, head down, trying to appear sanguine but wholly unable to control the wobble on his bottom lip.
When this has run its course over five, or in the case of Tuesday's game, six penalties per side, the winners form an ecstatic human pyramid, with the goalkeeper at its base and the reserve centre-back, who has only played twice all season, resplendent in his club blazer on the very top, milking the fans' applause. The losers, meanwhile, sink to their haunches and contemplate a contract advertising pizzas (though probably not in the Conference). The camera then picks out fans in the winners' section losing all sense of decorum, contrasting their insanely happy looks with the fat bloke among the losers, who is sitting glum-faced, tears coursing down his cheeks, texting home to tell them how useless his team were.
"That it should come to this," the commentator intones. "Surely there's a better way to decide a whole season than this?" A better way? Give over. We wouldn't miss this for the world.
================================================== ========
What do you guys think? I personally favour the return of the golden goal (Macca!!
), as the shoot-out gives me a serious heart failure. It is also fair to both sets of fans. I know we have been successful in our last 3 major shoot-outs, but imagine us losing all 3? It could've gone either way if our peno-takers bottled it in that fragment of a second.
RAFA 
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