England will step up their penalty-taking practice as they enter the Euro 2012 knockout rounds desperate to atone for repeated failures in shoot-outs, manager Roy Hodgson has revealed.
Hodgson’s side face Italy in the quarter-finals in Kiev on Sunday haunted by the knowledge that England have won only one penalty shoot-out – against Spain in 1996 – while losing on five other occasions.
The England manager said that while the unique pressures of a shoot-out can never be replicated in training, he plans to devote more attention to the issue ahead of the meeting with the Azzurri at the Olympic Stadium.
“We have practised already, we have used the time after training sessions to regularly practise some of those,” Hodgson said.
“We’ll obviously take it even more seriously now. But you can practice penalties until the cows come home – it’s really your ability to really block everything out and forget the occasion that means you score or you don’t score.”
In 1990, Chris Waddle and Stuart Pearce were the fall guys as England lost a World Cup semi-final to West Germany in a shoot-out.
The Germans prevailed in the same stage of Euro ’96 when Gareth Southgate missed, and two years later England exited the 1998 World Cup to Argentina on spot-kicks.
Back-to-back shoot-out failures against Portugal at Euro 2004 and the 2006 World Cup came to define the Sven-Goran Eriksson era, with the Swedish coach as perplexed as anyone by the mental block which had thwarted his team’s progress.
“We practised penalties so much, I really don’t know what more we could do about it,” was Eriksson’s baffled response after Portugal knocked England out of the 2006 World Cup.
Italy heroes Franco Baresi and Roberto Baggio famously missed their kicks in the 1994 World Cup final, allowing Brazil to collect the trophy.
Twelve years later, David Trezeguet was the ‘villain’ as Italy triumphed at France’s expense.
That was a rare Italian success, and Hodgson acknowledges the entire shoot-out saga frequently has unhappy endings.
“I’ve done it with other clubs in other countries before in my career,” he said.
“I’ve done it with Italians as well... so I’m quite good at it.”