SIDELINE CUT:The old enemies get ready to rumble and if it comes to penalties . . . look away if you're English
SOMETIMES DURING England games, the camera catches Stuart Pearce sitting pensively in the dug-out while Fabio Capello thrashes around pitch-side. Even in his playing days, old Psycho looked drawn to the point of exhaustion and his eyes always seemed lit with memories of another time. It is not hard to imagine him as a lauded character actor, playing a man permanently traumatised by some unspeakable terror.
It could well be while he is sitting there watching England labouring under mythic expectations, his mind returns to his own defining World Cup experience, when his penalty was saved by Bodo Illgner of Germany in the semi-final of Italia ’90.
“There will be penalties,” smiled a German fan in a restaurant the other night when asked to forecast tomorrow’s latest dance macabre down in Bloemfontein.
“And Germany will be efficient! We will be clinical. Of course Germany will win. Because we do not miss penalties.”
His friend laughed at this, joking it was well known that every German child learned “penalty-taking” from their first day in kindergarten and by the age of six would be able to step up before 60,000 fans and nail a penalty past any English goalkeeper as easily as they would sing the ABC.
“Even younger than six,” the German said solemnly. “Most of us are brilliant at penalties from the age of four.”
So much baggage between the two nations revolves around the World Wars and nothing captured this as well as Basil goose-stepping around the foyer of Fawlty Towers.
So much of the rivalry between England and Germany has been reduced to what happens between the footballers of both nations when confronted with what is, theoretically, the relatively simple task of scoring a penalty kick.
Why does some Englishman or another always bottle it? Why do the Germans appear to grow more confident and free from any doubt as the penalty roulette takes place?
Nothing illuminated the difference like Andreas Müller’s peacock strut after he knocked England out of Euro 1996 on penalties. That day, Gareth Southgate, dependable as they come, was the tabloid villain when his penalty was stopped.
England’s trauma over the penalty kick is as mysterious to Germans as Germany’s dauntless mastery of the penalty-shoot out is to Englishmen. The English talk about it so much and dread it in a sort of bluff and jokey way that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Fabio Capello has already indicated the five men who will stand for England if tomorrow’s knock-out match comes down to penalties: Frank Lampard, Steven Gerrard, Wayne Rooney, Jamie Milner and Gareth Barry.
The first two habitually bang home penalties for their clubs and seem to relish the particular nerve required to place the ball, concentrate through the whistles of the crowd, pick a spot in their mind and then execute the kick.
Rooney is a solid penalty man. They are as good as any players on earth at scoring penalties. Gerrard has known the excruciating drama of the penalty shoot-out when he lifted the European Cup for Liverpool on that unbelievable night in Istanbul.
But history suggests one of these five men – perhaps poor Milner – is going to finish the night joining the ranks of Englishmen who cracked against the Germans.
Somehow, penalty shoot-outs between England and Germany translate themselves as German interrogations of the English psyche. Football mythology decrees the Germans are not going to miss. So it comes down to how long the Englanders can keep the stiff upper lip.
The Englishmen step up to take their penalties vaguely hoping they can help put the team through the next stage but desperately hoping not to be the unlucky one, the one that misses.
For English football men, the penalty-shoot out holds traumatic repercussions similar to the Russian roulette scene in The Deer Hunter. Somebody has to crack somewhere.
The Germans have demonstrated they are perfectly capable of missing World Cup penalties. Lucas Podolski did just that against Serbia in Germany’s second match and sat on the grass dazed afterwards, probably realising he had done something few German footballers ever do.
Not since 1974, when Uli Hoeness misfired against Poland, has any German missed a penalty in normal time. Uli Steilke did miss in the 1982 semi-final penalty shoot-out against France but Germany won anyhow.
The encouragement England fans might take from Podolski’s miss may be tempered by the fact he was born in Poland to Polish parents and remains a Polish citizen, so he may not have the full flow of Germanic penalty-kicking ice in his veins.
England’s three World Cup penalty shoot-out defeats have been to Germany (’90), Argentina (’98) and Portugal (’06). But it is the German penalty-takers that stalk their dreams.
“My world collapsed,” Pearce said of that bleak walk away from the penalty box. Pearce recovered to participate in future penalty shoot-outs for England, even scoring against Germany in Euro ’96. But nothing can erase the sudden, lurching awfulness of that miss against Germany.
CLARIFICATION: It has come to my attention that a paragraph in last week's column about English hooliganism inferred the Hillsborough stadium tragedy was attributable to hooliganism. That was not my intention. Hillsborough was a disgrace in that the abject failure to police and steward a football match led to the death of 96 innocent people and injury and ongoing trauma to so many more. Please accept my sincere apologies if the relevant paragraph caused offence.
