There are many ways to take a penalty kick, as was demonstrated in FC Edmonton’s 2-1 victory over the Indy Eleven this past Saturday.
Dustin Corea was given a chance to open the scoring, but blasted his initial shot off the crossbar to the keeper’s left. Luckily for Corea and the Eddies, Indy was called for encroachment, and the El Salvador international went low and to the keeper’s right on his second opportunity.
Two penalty chances. Two completely different locations. It almost seems unfair for the goalkeeper, doesn’t it?
“I think, as a goalkeeper, in your head, you have to be comfortable going into it, you can’t have any fear about it,” FC Edmonton shot-stopper Chris Konopka explains. “And then just have a bit of confidence that ‘yeah, alright, I’m gonna make the save’, and hopefully you get a good hand to it.”
“The shooter has most of the pressure up there,” Corea says of the player-keeper showdown.
It’s a momentum-changing point in any match. If a goal is scored, that team gets an obvious boost, but if the attempt is stopped, things can swing the other way very quickly. So, is there anything a keeper can do to tilt the scales in his favour?
“You can do all the studying, you can do whatever you can on a daily basis to prepare yourself for a penalty, but at the end of the day, the player could change his mind last minute, he could be waiting on you, waiting on a move that you do that you’re not expecting,” Konopka notes.
“The best term is an educated guess of where you might have an opportunity to make the save.”
While goalkeepers can study shooters, hoping to pick up on their tendencies, Corea says it doesn’t necessarily work the other way.
“I think they know more about us than we know about them,” he suggests. “For me, it’s all about the goalkeeper, seeing his ability throughout the game, seeing how he’s gonna be during the PK.”
For both of his attempts, Corea utilised a stutter step, another weapon the shooter has in his arsenal.
“When I was shooting in El Salvador, when I stuttered, most of the time, [the keeper] would take two steps forward, and it just threw them off,” Corea explains.
While shooters enjoy the stutter step, it is slightly controversial. Some purists suggest it shouldn’t be allowed, and many keepers would agree.
“I’m not a fan of it, because I know what forwards are trying to do, they’re trying to see if a goalkeeper is moving one way, and he can show back the other way,” says Konopka. “I also think goalkeepers nowadays expect that. You don’t expect the player to just run up and hit it.”
FC Edmonton head coach Colin Miller is quite familiar with penalty kicks. He was a part of the Canadian squad that fell to Australia in the 1994 World Cup intercontinental playoff in PK’s.
“I was number 5 to take a penalty to keep us in the World Cup,” Miller recalls. “I actually didn’t get the chance to take the penalty because we had been knocked out before it got to there, but the pressure that’s on is quite remarkable.”
“I actually admire people that want to take penalty kicks because it’s not for everybody.”
When asked his thoughts on the stutter step, Miller said he’s a bit old school, and prefers to see a regular run-up, but also understands that it is part of the routine of some players. There is one style of spot kick, however, that the gaffer never wants to see from his squad.
“I despise to see somebody who tries to chip the keeper,” says Miller. “I think if one of our players tried to do that, I would take him off the field.”
Eddies players, you’ve been warned.
FC Edmonton begins a two-game road trip Saturday, June 3 at Estadio Juan Ramon Loubriel against Puerto Rico FC before facing the New York Cosmos for the first time this season on Wednesday, June 7 at MCU Park in Brooklyn. Kickoff on June 3 is at 5:30 PM MT and the match can be streamed live on NASL.com.