7 min
The penalty is not where you think it is
It is decided in the walk, not the strike. Almost everything that can be trained about a penalty happens before you place the ball.
Ask somebody who missed one what went wrong and they will describe the contact. Almost nobody describes the walk, which is where the decision was actually made and where their attention went somewhere it could not come back from — usually the goalkeeper, occasionally the crowd, frequently a sentence somebody said in the changing room in 2019.
What separates the people who handle it is not calm. It is that their attention has somewhere specific to be, chosen in advance and rehearsed until it holds under a heart rate of 180: a point on the ball, a breath with a defined length, a first step. Not a thought — thoughts are unreliable at that heart rate — but something physical and small enough to actually do.
This is trainable in about four sessions and it does not require you to become a different person. It requires you to decide, once and calmly, where your eyes and your attention are going to be, and then to practise it enough that it survives the walk.
You do not have to be in crisis to book
The most common sentence in a first session is that they nearly did not come because it did not feel bad enough to deserve it.
Your player is not fragile. Your environment might be.
For coaches. Some of what gets referred to me as a mindset problem is a coaching problem, and I am going to say so.