by Mohamed Haniff
For 120 minutes it worked, the English were hanging on by the skin of their teeth keeping the Italians at bay. The boys in blue had seen the bar hit twice and a goal chalked off for offside as England retreated deeper and deeper into their own penalty box. The English fans felt like for once the rub of the green was going their way; they’d spent the entire game on the back foot but a penalty shootout doesn’t always go to the best team. England had successfully reduced the game to a 50-50 shot whether this was a good decision or not is debateable.
The truth is that the English didn’t have much of a choice with their attacking players offering very little of threat as they broke out from the back. England’s distinct lack of ability to hold onto the ball kept them under pressure for the majority of the game, chasing the ball in their own half. The players seemed content to go to penalties and when Riccardo Montolivo skewed his penalty wide the hopes of a nation were suddenly lifted; up stepped to Rooney to blast the ball into the back of the net to put the English 2-1 up in the penalty shootout.
At this point the man of the match and arguably the tournament’s best player so far changed the entire complexion of the shootout. We often hear that psychology is an important part of sport, anyone who has ever played sport at any level has encountered the prick that just won’t shut up in an attempt to put you off. There are of course other ways to influence the game in a psychological manner. As Pirlo placed the ball on the spot 12 yards out, the Italians were fearful, up until this point Hart had looked impenetrable. Having guessed right for both penalties and seen one fizz past his post, many of the Italian players were probably wondering what it would take to beat him; the pressure was building in them, then Pirlo did the unthinkable.
Joe Hart lay sprawled out on the ground as the ball floated beyond him and into the empty net. Pirlo had not only humiliated Hart on the world stage and given us all a jaw dropping moment to share with our grandchildren; he had humanized the English goalkeeper. It was as though he turned to his teammates and told them “I told you he’s not that good.” Tellingly as the camera pans away from the scene of the crime you can see the relief in the Italians eyes, it was as if a giant weight had been lifted off of them, while the English were awestruck and seemed unable to process what hit them. When Ashley Young stepped up he looked completely rattled and just seemed to want to get it over with as fast as possible, subsequently smashing the frame of the crossbar.
The question is had Pirlo chosen to simply smash the ball home would it have had the same kind of impact? In hitting that penalty the way he did he reduced the game to a schoolyard shootout for the Italians. He had shown that them it wasn’t so hard to stick the ball in the back of the net while the English who were leading the shootout at this point couldn’t quite believe what they had just witnessed. It’s the small details like this that change the course of history, as terrible as England were on the night they were not too far off from reaching the semi-final, and the Italians owe a great deal to “L’Architetto”.
Composure was the difference between the two sides tonight, for about 100 of the 120 minutes the Italians displayed supreme composure over the English who didn’t seem to know what to do with the ball when they got it. Ultimately it was the perfect display of composure which changed the whole course of the shootout and arguably the identity of the team which would play Germany in semi-final number two on Thursday.
