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How to Take the Perfect Soccer Penalty
To understand how to take a match-winning penalty, you’ve got to understand the physics behind the perfect kick.
As John Wesson points out in The Science of Soccer, taking into account air drag, a perfectly directed “penalty” hit at 80 mph into the top corner of the goal could, in theory, defeat a goalkeeper from 35 yards. England’s Jordan Pickford is one goalkeeper who has used past behavior of penalty takers and their preferred goal placements to predict their future choices, keeping this data on his bottle for reference. The results showed that when anxious, footballers looked at the goalkeeper significantly earlier and for longer, making it more likely that a player would focus on the keeper and shoot more centrally.
Or read this on Wired