by Peter Crouch
The free role liberates you. If the ball coming in is low, the man at the near post will get rid of it. If it’s too high the keeper can come to claim it. If it’s in your zone, great, because heading the ball away as a striker who is defending is so much easier than heading a ball in as a striker who is strikering. No need to angle it into a corner, or keep it down. You can pretty much head it anywhere, as long as it’s away from your own goal. It’s everything that being a striker isn’t. As a striker trying to score you can go delicate glance (always tricky) or use the pace on it to power it back the way it has come. Defending it you just smash it up and away, and when you do get a big pie on it, you’ll be guaranteed a lusty cheer from the relieved crowd. Your only concern is to make sure your brain is calibrated for the correct end of the pitch. No one wants to see a defending striker jump for an opposition corner and give it a nice little glance into the ‘D’.
We live in an era when every minute aspect of the sport is studied and gamed for advantage. We have goalkeepers who can hit a pass on the move like a midfielder of twenty years ago. We drink shots of beetroot juice to reduce muscle soreness. And yet the humble goal-kick – one of the most used of all set pieces – had so little attention paid to it for years, so little variety in its execution. You go long to hit the striker. You go short to hit one of the full-backs who have split. That’s pretty much it. Unless you were Swansea under Roberto Martínez or Brendan Rodgers, when they went through a spell of insisting that the keeper roll it out to his centre-backs regardless of how the match was going or where the opposition strikers might be lurking. Jon Walters, Steven Nzonzi and I were like coiled springs, knowing exactly where the ball was going but pretending to be oblivious. Until the ball was passed, at which point the three of us would be all over them. In one match we got the ball off them so many times it was hard not to laugh – shots off at goal, passes to someone unmarked in the box … Their poor fans were going bananas. ‘Just fucking lump it!’
There are principles and there is stupidity. You don’t have to just punt it. They could have dropped it into the striker, over our heads, take the press out of the game. Clipped it onto the chest of their striker and played it nicely along the deck from there. Had they done it even once, we may have retreated a little. Not even Pep Guardiola will persist with a more theoretically attractive option if it isn’t working. Instead, year after year Swansea would come up to Stoke and try to play like that. We would win the ball, get our crosses in, retreat and wait for it to happen again. Our fans absolutely loved it. Few things please a Stokie more than a physical steamrollering of someone who fancies themselves as a little more sophisticated and stylish.
If you win a corner, there are three main ways the ball can come in: inswinger, outswinger and clip – straight and true. The last of these, the driven ball, is the hardest to get right. Charlie Adam was perfect at it, as was David Beckham in my England days. As a striker you can see the flight of the ball all the way. The assumption from those not fortunate enough to play elite football is that the inswinger is an easier ball to head into the goal, on the basis that it’s heading that way already. In fact, the opposite is true. The outswinger comes at you with more pace. You can track its trajectory and attack it. The inswinger is always going away from you and towards the defender and goalkeeper. You’re chasing it. It’s like when you play swingball, and you’re trying to hit a ball in the same direction as it’s already heading. You get half a racquet on it at best. The outswinger is the ball coming to your backhand side that you meet flush with a forehand. The inswinger is a glance. The outswinger is BANG.
There are certain memes now attached to the taking of a corner. Corner takers try to get a bit of backspin on the ball as they drop it into the quadrant, even though when you actually take it the ball has to be motionless. Players now try to place the ball as far over the line as they can, which maybe gives you a fractional advantage if you’re looking to whip it close in to the six-yard box and don’t want it to go out of play first, but mainly serves to wind up the opposition fans sitting nearby. ‘LINESMAN! LINO!’ The taker may raise one arm, or both, or bounce the ball before placing it down, and each will mean a different delivery – one near post, one far post, one come-short-please. They tend to rotate over the course of a season, in case the opposition have done a Marcelo Bielsa and spied on your drills, which only serves to confuse us. ‘But you had both arms up.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘I thought that was …’ ‘Last week.’
I can feel both a great sympathy and significant anger towards the defender on the post. It amuses me how they always hold onto the post, as if the goal is going to move if they let go, or the post is going to pull a shimmy and lose them. I hate that defender when you smash in a perfect header, the goalkeeper is nowhere, and then they pop up to nod it off the line. I feel sorry for them because they’re often the shortest defender, the taller ones gainfully employed marking actual humans rather than vertical pieces of wood. Often the ball will sail over their head, and they’re left desperately craning their necks and contorting their faces and making a straining noise. All the while really wanting to stretch up and palm it away, but knowing that’s an instant red card, jumping up with arms ostentatiously behind them instead, as if they’re wearing handcuffs.
One rule trumps all others at attacking corners: the ball in must beat the first man. I still find it amazing how often in the world of professional football that the first man gets hit. The taker tries to get too much pace on it, or lifts his head too early, and the moans and groans from the crowd are ringing in your ears. It’s an absolute heartbreaker at the best of times, and the later it gets in a match, the more you’re chasing a game, the more it hurts. As a fan you’d rather see the ball go straight out of play behind the goal than fail to beat the first man. Ninety-third minute with the goalkeeper up, failing to beat the first man should be a straight yellow. No player would ever argue.
PENALTIES
Because I am a footballer, because the game has obsessed me since I can remember and filled my brain with nonsense when it could possibly have more usefully been filled with other things, I will often pose philosophical questions to myself. What would it be like to actually be as bad at football as a goalkeeper? Why does Glen Johnson not appear to suffer from hangovers? What made me once think that paying £800 for a jumper was acceptable?
But the question I find myself mulling over on long coach journeys or late into the night in strange hotel rooms is this: if you had to choose one player – from the start of human existence – to score a penalty to save your life, who would you call up?
My shortlist comes together within minutes. Harry Kane, because I never think he’s going to miss. His World Cup ones in the summer of 2018 were almost cruel in their perfection. Into the corner every time, with a lovely crispness and pace. No one’s saving a penalty like that. Alan Shearer, because he would never mess about. Shearer didn’t tuck a penalty away. He buried it. Same with Steven Gerrard. You put that much pace and finesse on it and the goalkeeper needs not only to guess the right way but be moving in that direction before the ball is struck.
I’m not obsessed with power. Frank Lampard would place them. Teddy Sheringham used to open up his body at the last minute and caress the ball home in such relaxed fashion that he could have been in his back garden. Matt Le Tissier could do it any way he chose, which is why he scored forty-seven of the forty-eight he ever took in competition for Southampton. It was almost as if he could do perfect impersonations of all the others: pace, accuracy, corners, down the middle, inside of foot, gone before the keeper could move, waiting until the poor unfortunate had committed himself and started falling over.
In my life or death scenario, I can’t have room for the flash merchants. Eden Hazard is wonderfully cool the way he takes his, all gentle trots in and casual little dinks. Great for him, appalling for my nerves. I’d rather fall on my own sword than be put through that. It’s the same with Paul Pogba’s technique. It might work for him but for me, w
aiting for the executioner’s nod, it would be far too antagonising. Even the way he approaches the ball is hard to watch.
I wouldn’t be adverse to the no-nonsense defender approach. You watched David Unsworth lumber up to a penalty like a mighty digger towards a small rock and you felt certainty that he would come out on top. His successor at Everton, Leighton Baines, had a contrasting physique but a similar stone-cold reliability. Full-backs with a sweet touch are a fine bet – Denis Irwin, Lee Dixon, Kieran Trippier. A striker who is a pure poacher rather than a technical player is not. I would never, ever want Filippo Inzaghi taking a penalty to save my life. Brilliant finisher, too flicky and nudgy to keep me alive.
Even goalkeepers can make great penalty-takers. Kevin Pressman smashed one home for Sheffield Wednesday that is still travelling in the same direction at the same immense pace, somewhere just outside the orbit of Venus. Peter Schmeichel used to hit them so hard you feared the ball would explode on contact with his right boot. René Higuita took loads. Chile’s José Luis Chilavert found them so easy he would sometimes take free-kicks just outside the box too. He once scored a hat-trick of penalties in a single match for his Argentine club Vélez Sarsfield. Respect.
A top professional player should be able to put a penalty where they like. Despite that, we all have a default, a spot where we naturally prefer to stick it. When you’re under the most pressure it becomes almost impossible to fight that urge; something deep inside you makes a calculation based on risk and seriousness of impact and settles for what you know best.
That doesn’t mean it always works. My natural shape is to go for the right-hand bottom corner and whip them with pace. I fell back on it when playing for Stoke against Liverpool in the 2016 Capital One Cup semi-final shoot-out, and Simon Mignolet saved it. Abbey’s dad Geoff, a lifelong Liverpool fan, was convinced afterwards that I had celebrated, convinced that my time at Anfield was more important to me than my current employers. I hadn’t. I was so angry it had been saved that as the ball rebounded back to me I tried to punch it away. Geoff looked away at the wrong time and looked back to see me with a clenched fist waved in the air. I’m still not sure he believes me.
It wasn’t my lowest moment involving Liverpool and penalties. In the depths of my awful goalless run with them at the beginning of my time at Anfield, convinced I was never going to score any other way, I snatched the ball off Gerrard when we were awarded a penalty against Portsmouth. Stevie was okay about it. He understood, and let me have it. Rafa Benítez was fuming, but I was convinced. Right up to the moment it was saved. Thankfully Bolo Zenden nodded the rebound in. I say thankfully. I was supposed to run off after him to celebrate. Instead I just wanted to punch him. You’ve never seen a player more distraught at his own team scoring a goal.
Grabbing the ball off your usual penalty taker can never end well. If you score, it’s not like you’re a hero. You’ve only done what was going to be done anyway. If you miss it you appear both incredibly selfish and mindbendingly stupid. You think of Riyad Mahrez sticking his penalty over the bar for Manchester City against Liverpool, having taken it from Gabriel Jesus. You think of Christian Benteke, eight months without a goal for Crystal Palace, elbowing aside the dead-eyed Luka Milivojević to then miss against Bournemouth as Palace slumped to the bottom of the Premier League. These things haunt you.
I’ve had my good moments too. Take Southampton against Portsmouth in the FA Cup, January 2005: an always spicy South Coast derby turned red-hot by Harry Redknapp’s recent defection from Pompey to the Saints. As a former Portsmouth man I was also less than popular with the away end, even less so when I stepped up to a penalty in the ninety-second minute that could win it for Southampton.
I wasn’t the designated penalty-taker. Had Jamie Redknapp or Kevin Phillips been fit then I would have been nowhere near it. Even as I walked towards the spot with the ball tucked under my arm I was vaguely aware of Harry waving frantically from the touchline. Through the bedlam of 30,000 amped-up fans either screaming with delight or disgust I could still make out his desperate message. ‘CROUCHIE! NOOOOOOO …’
I was young, I was confident and I was in form. I stuck the ball down and banged it home. Two minutes later, when the final whistle sounded, Harry legged it over and gave me the embrace of an ecstatic man. ‘Son, you realise that at 1–1 we’re looking at a replay back at Fratton Park. We both know what that would be like. Thank fuck you scored …’
My personal default penalty is to look bottom right and then hit it the other way. After twenty years as a professional footballer, however, that is now too obvious. Every goalkeeper in Britain knows about it. And so it comes down a game of bluff and counter-bluff that should in theory be thrilling but is in fact mainly confusing. Do I look towards one corner of the goal as I step up and then actually put it there? It’s a cunning ruse if you’re expecting my usual pen but it’s also massively obvious where I’m going to put it, if that isn’t contradictory. I’m giving the keeper the eyes but actually I’m not – I’m giving him the triple-eyes, because I’m looking in the opposite direction to my standard pen which is in itself the opposite corner to straightforward eyes. Perhaps it’s clear now why I missed those pens for Liverpool and Stoke.
There’s also the duration of the gaze. You can’t just glance to the fake corner; you have to look long enough that the goalie actually spots it. At the same time you can’t stare, because then he knows you’re faking it. At that point you’ve overstated your case. You see a lot of players now put the ball down, walk backwards and go No-Eyes, which blows my mind. How can you be sure the goal and its custodian are exactly where your subconscious now thinks they are? It’s for this reason that I like to back away and look at the whole goal, not just to recalibrate my sights but to strike fear into the keeper that I could literally stick this one anywhere. If you run in to the ball off a No-Eyes approach, you might just arrive in fractionally the wrong place for your standing foot. Even drifting off course by a few degrees could be enough to see you wrecked on the rocks. I’m scared of arriving half a foot off and swinging wildly with my striking foot while the other one gently nudges the ball three inches off the spot.
The great cliché of successful penalty taking? ‘Never change your mind.’ Thing is, what if the keeper moves early, in the direction that you were going to shoot? Surely it’s better to then change your mind and go the other way. And so I say: leave room for doubt, but don’t be swamped by it. The issue comes not from changing your mind but doing neither one thing nor the other: planning to go right, then becoming unsure about going right, thinking late about going left and finally scuffing it feebly down the middle into the keeper’s shins instead. It’s certainly worth watching the goalkeeper, and if you have the nerve, wait until he commits, as Yakubu used to do. They tell you too never to lift your head, just as they do when you’re playing golf, but I’m not convinced that matters either. If you’re hitting through the ball nicely, why not have a little look up to catch it in flight? Equally this may equally explain why, despite me living on a golf course, my handicap is still stuck at sixteen.
It’s a cruel thing, a penalty miss. I was nine years old, playing for the year above in school in a cup competition, when I messed up for the first time. I still remember it clear as day. I put it wide. And as we trudged off, having lost because of my mistake, all the older kids were looking at me with disgust on their faces, as if to say, what are you even doing playing here?
You do all you can to make sure it doesn’t happen but you can never protect yourself entirely. Lampard was sensational from the spot. With England he used to stay behind after every training session to work on them. But he still missed in our World Cup quarter-final defeat to Portugal in 2006. So did Gerrard. It didn’t make them bad penalty-takers and it didn’t render all their hours of practice worthless. It simply reflected the odds. A goalkeeper can go left, right or stand up. If you take fifty penalties he’s going to get lucky at least once. What matters more than having one saved is t
hat you shrug it off and score the next one. Stick with your method. Hold your nerve.
It’s why I will never understand the striker who does not want to take a pen. Yes, you will miss at some point, probably painfully. But it’s the closest you get to a free goal. I’d have chalked up way more than 108 Premier League goals had I been the designated taker for my various clubs, rather than in the clean-hitting shadow of Gerrard, Charlie Adam and Jermain Defoe.
You can find joy in the miss too. When you flip it round and the opposition blow one against you, it’s like being convinced you’ve left your credit card in the pub only to find it in your coat pocket. Woo-hoo! If they then stick the rebound in it’s worse than if they scored in the first place. It’s like thinking you’ve found your credit card and then pulling it out to discover it’s an old train ticket. As a fan you’re halfway through a wild celebration when suddenly you have to shut up again. You feel like a fool. Meanwhile the goalkeeper is going absolutely bananas at his defence. The subtext is clear: I’ve bailed you muppets out once already, and you can’t even help me out now? So too is the fact that they’re secretly quite chuffed when a pen is awarded in the first place. It’s their chance to shine, to be a hero. If it goes in it’s the fault of the bloke who gave away the foul. They can’t lose.