I think this is one of those "when you start thinking about it, you mess up" scenarios that I encounter with plenty of things. Like when playing a piece of piano music from memory - as soon as I start trying to think about which notes come next, I make mistakes and sometimes even have mental blanks and need to take a break before "remembering" again.
If that were so then putting someone else off their game by drawing their attention to a particular aspect of their game and making them self conscious would be less effective.
Not the parent, but no. Once you’re playing music from memory, your brain already knows the notes/fingering/etc. It’s that when you start thinking, you get out of the “flow”. Too much thinking will pull you right out and then you need to work to get back in it.
A few years ago a replayed an old video game that I hadn't played since childhood. There are a few parts of the game that were quite difficult and involved a fairly complicated sequence of events, one of them being the final boss battle.
When I got to the boss I remembered the battle being quite complicated and intense but I couldn't remember where to move, when to jump, or when to attack. But after a few tries as if by magic my fingers took over and executed the sequence of buttons flawlessly. It was amazing because I didn't consciously know what came next but my fingers did. I also felt a sense of euphoria as the memory came back to me; it was a really interesting thing to experience.
Yep, I get this with guitar and signing too. If I think about it too much my voice tightens up and I'll start missing notes. The same thing with dancing. I realised long ago that I'm not naturally good at these things because I find it impossible to switch off my brain. When I dance I'm thinking "which direction should I move in" when should I spin my partner" etc. Ask anyone who dances how they know the answers to these questions and they can't tell you. They just don't think about it.
It’s especially true when a dance floor is crowded or it’s harder to listen to the music. It’s harder to "cut loose" if one or two restrictions are going on.
For dancing, a couple things helped me out. Repetition and practice. Practicing whole movements together, e.g. footwork with the lead, there is a strong relationship between footwork and your ability to gently exert force and direction. Sure I learned a tuck turn to counts, but I never think about the count of it when leading it, it is engrained into the overall movement I want to execute.
There’s an interesting phenomenon that happens at dance events with a heavy teaching component. The first night of dancing is pretty good and when lessons go underway the level of the room slightly drops because people are trying new things. Incorporating new things would do that and it happens, albeit awkwardly.
It does not only apply for penalty kicks. I encountered this situation on the pitch regularly, especially when I had time instead of pressure.
Same in table tennis. I tend to make unforced errors the more time I got.
Whilst it's technically a tennis coaching book, the tennis is really just an example to explain bigger things.
Anyway, there's a great story in that book where he says something like "if you want to put someone off their game, compliment them on how strong their backhand [or whatever] is today. From then on they'll think about it before every stroke and destroy their own performance."
That definitely happens to me. Additional thoughts go through a pro player’s head during penalty kicks. 11 years ago I was fascinated by a short Freakonomics podcast. The data shows that the best chance of scoring is to kick it straight down the center to the keeper. However, most people won’t do this even though their odds are better since the pain of kicking it to a keeper who does not dive to the side and instead catches your ball is far greater than not scoring!
Scientific studies also show that "rock" is the best throw in rock-paper-scissor*. Always shooting center is as ridiculous as always throwing "rock".
* Rock and scissor are both thrown at 35%, with paper at 29.6%. The article suggests throwing paper to exploit that, but that makes no sense, since you will win 35% lose 35% and draw 29.6%. Rock on the other hand wins at 35%, draw 35% and lose 29.6% https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-blame-game/20150...
In a one time throw against a complete stranger, okay. But your friends will notice that you always throw rock, and you start to lose 100% of the time.
> the best chance of scoring is to kick it straight down the center to the keeper.
it's called "panenka" after a player that used to do this in high-stakes games to rub it in. You have to fake your run-up well - otherwise good keepers will notice the difference in run-up and make you look like an idiot [1]
I don't think it's the best chance. Panenkas are about 50-50 and normal penalties are about 70%-30%. And most of that 30% is missing the goal completely. If you go hard either side and don't miss the goal it's almost 100% no matter if the keeper dives the right way.
Then there are strikers like Lewandowski who wait for keeper to decide and go the other way [2]. This is all about developing a subconscious routine and doing it mechanically without thinking. You have no time to consciously process the data and choose the other side.
While I don't have the stats to back the latter part up, the expected goal (xG) from a penalty kick is .76 - 76% of penalties end up being scored. Keepers quite often will guess right, and at that point both the placement and power have to be perfect. If they are, it's a goal practically every time, but most players will compromise on either placement or power.
This may be different in recreational contexts, as professional keepers dive frighteningly quickly, and are very good at reading the body language of the PK taker.
A Panenka is a specific type of penalty through the center. It's a sort of chip/scoop shot and it goes really slow. It makes the keeper look foolish if it comes off. But it's slow enough that even a keeper diving to one side has a chance to recover, as seen in the video you shared.
But there's also the option of taking a normal run-up and blasting it straight down the middle. No keeper is going to be able read that since there's nothing to disguise. And if they dive, it's going too fast for the keeper to recover and save.
The keeper is biased toward action. If they just stand in the center and don't dive they'll be blamed for not even trying. So a hard, fast penalty down the center has pretty good odds of succeeding.
Am I right to say that keepers do a "split step" landing when they see a kick toward them is immenent (which a penalty shot certainly is)?—just as tennis players must do.
For the uninitiated, a split-step "hop" allows the defender to be uncommitted at the instant of your opponents strike; it provides an equal capacity to move any particular direction, as momentum is removed from the equation.
They usually step forward, and not a true split step. The thing is, if you watch slow motion of penalty kicks (and I remember there was some kind of study) goalkeepers actually have to start moving before the player kicks the ball or it is pretty much impossible to reach most balls (except the ones to the center). You can see they move forward with one leg (sometimes by more than one meter) with the decision of which side already taken.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote about this in his brilliant essay - The Art of Failure. "When Jana Novotna faltered at Wimbledon, it was because she began thinking about her shots again. She lost her fluidity, her touch." https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/08/21/the-art-of-fai...
Soccer/football coach Thomas Tuchel, previously at BVB & PSG and now at Chelsea is pretty well known for handing out copies of that book to his players.
and is there any advices in this book to avoid focusing on the technique in important moment? I used to play foosball competitively and this used to eat me when I started to doubt about my technique.
I heard this a long time ago, and it has always struck me as nonsense. Sure, mindgames are useful, but for elite athletes technique is second nature. In soccer, you're better off telling someone their sister is a whore (ie Materazzi to Zidane), kicking them in the heels, or exaggerating contact. Maybe complementing someone works better in individual sports like golf or tennis, but even then I think it would only work on the naive. I've gotten compliments in the middle of soccer games, and I usually laugh them off. I can't imagine being fooled with that sort of amateurish tactic.
There are some things you can do better on instinct and some things you need to be conscious.
Shooting penalty kicks falls into the former. Organizing the soccer match into the later :)
Even on the instinctual level, you need consciousness to hone your instincts. For example things like physical therapy or even athletic training are conscious interventions to reshape your instinct. The best penalty kickers in the world likely made a conscious choice at some point to practice these kicks until their good form became habitual.
To put it in computer terms : it's the same reason why we have task-specific hardware and general purpose hardware and software. The more a task reoccurs, the more you benefit from a device dedicated to the task. And the more heterogeneous your workload is, the more you benefit from broadly defined non-specialized capabilities.
In that respect, the beauty of the human brain is that it can go from one to the other depending on your habits.
I guess every musician knows this as well: You are in the perfect flow, groovin' along, you know what I mean, and then the moment you start thinking... you mess up.
Sometimes I like to believe the mastery of consciously shifting attention to some part while not disturbing the other tracks that
run subconsciously in your head is one distinguishing feature of the real virtuoso.
In music, "conscious" thinking deteriorates performance, because you'll be too late. It adds at least 100ms, but often more (note: there are explanations that model the delay as extra processing, or as interference, or as inhibition), so you'll drop out of the rhythm in no time. It also messes up fast fingering, so you'll be out of tune as well. Motor functions are really time sensitive. Try to write a word while thinking what your fingers have to do to move the pen...
I'm not sure this study shows this, though. Lesser activity may be caused by other effects, e.g. because they're better trained, they can set up the motor program (which is often ballistic) in less time. There's also an account where accuracy is linked to larger ensembles of neurons firing simultaneously, so inaccuracy might look the same as prolonged activity.
The flip side of this is that some of the best elite penalty takers essentially outthink the opposing goalkeeper. The safest penalty is placed slightly to the opposite side to the one the keeper dives to, which has plenty of margin for error (and if the keeper doesn't move early they're not saving anything that isn't down the middle)
Smashing a ball into the top corner [without needing to think about it] is also unsaveable and popular with elite penalty takers, but the margin for error in how you actually kick the ball is smaller: a slight miscue and your penalty is off target (or a "nice height" for a keeper that reads where you're shooting).
> and if the keeper doesn't move early they're not saving anything that isn't down the middle
Most penalties are poorly taken. I hate seeing a keeper dive early to a random side only to be beaten by a weak shot down the middle. I assume that keepers don't have faith in their nerves/reactions and thus have to force their bodies to dive before the shot is taken. Otherwise the best strategy for the keeper is to wait for the shot
Yeah, wait for the shot and always late for a save. They do this for a living, they move before ball rolling for a reason: human not fast enough for a shot from pro.
Not fast enough for a shot from a pro, a good shot to the top right corner sure. But a penalty shot straight down the middle? A keeper isn't fast enough to catch that?
The keeper won't save as many. You're arguing that the keeper should carry out a suboptimal (non-Nash equilibrium) strategy just to satisfy your aesthetic preferences?
Have you considered that the few people who have managed to rise to the top of one of the most competitive fields in the world, as well as the clubs who have have many millions of pounds depending on the result of a penalty kick ... may possibly be better at taking penalty kicks, and are more aware of the best strategy than yourself?
Welcome to HN. You see these kind of posts on every topic (I have had first-hand knowledge of a certain event, and you come on here and someone will tell you with authority that you are wrong...and actually X/Y/Z happened...this place is very unique).
What people also underestimate is how hard professionals hit the ball, without looking like they are hitting it hard. I had a relatively hard shot, I have injured GKs in pens, I trained with a guy who was once a reserve keeper for a lower division professional side (retired a few years)...I didn't come close to scoring because my shots were nowhere near hard enough. Free kicks are the same, you see the shot in slow-mo, it looks like they are swatting the ball softly...in reality, their technique is so good/efficient that they are crushing it whilst aiming it carefully.
Most professional clubs employ people who just look at penalties. They look at techniques, they look at strategies...saying that the keeper should wait for the ball when it is going 70mph and you have under 100ms to decide is...ludicrous.
Yes, and I am saying no-one has reactions that fast. Professionals hit the ball 70-80mph...up the chain someone said that keepers should just wait and see where it is going: this isn't humanly possible, there isn't enough time.
What they do is: statistical analysis of every penalty taker to see what preference they have (what corner, what they do home/away, what they do when they are facing a goal at a certain end, etc.) and most professional goalkeepers are pretty much experts in watching how players run up to the ball, how the taker's eyes move, how they position their body, how they position their non-striking leg (and strikers counter this: you will notice that most professional takers will look at the ball when they put it down, turn away from the keeper when they walk back, usually keep looking at the ball or directly at the keeper before they start running, and not look away from the ball when running up...there are reasons for this). And clubs will analyse videos of taker tendencies, and keeper tendencies.
Also fwiw just because > Most professional clubs employ people who just look at penalties. They look at techniques, they look at strategies < doesn't always result in professionals choosing the best technique or strategy. Here's an example:
You and the parent you are replying to are right - pro clubs know the ins and outs of penalties and select and train players (keepers and takers) accordingly.
You are being distracted from the meat and bones of the argument though - the whole premise that most penalties are poorly taken is blatantly wrong. Most penalties end up in goals - which is how it's intended to be.
If the goals were smaller and most penalties did not result in goal that would not mean they are poorly taken.
These people are obviously the best in the world at what they do, they are picked specifically and paid generously in order to be able to kick a ball into a net. Discussing casually how they could improve without any apparent indepth knowledge is a level of hubris that hackers news is known for breeding.
> If the goals were smaller and most penalties did not result in goal
Then they arguably wouldn't be penalties.
But there's no need to argue with me, I've been watching football for some odd 30 years and playing for a good subset of that. It has never occurred to me that penalties are taken poorly at the pro level - I've seen absolute dross at the amateur level, but I concur that most pro penalty takers are phenomenal, both from a statistical and aesthetical perspective. Not that I think there is that much value in the latter - by design, a penalty kick is the most aesthetically boring of all set pieces. A penalty kick ensues higher emotions due to the odds at play, but from a purely aesthetical point of view, I'd argue that even a corner kick has a much higher potential (a volley, a bicycle kick, a header, a fine-tuned "chess play" that cracks the defense open, etc.)
And a penalty kick doesn't compare to the myriad other open plays in football which have infinitely more aesthetic appeal. A penalty kick is about creating a certain balance of odds, simple as. Every other consideration is secondary.
Yes, goal frequency is 75-85% in professional play. Amazing but it shows how much skill takers have (players like Baines, Henry, and more recently Fernandes are over 90%...which is just crazy).
According to a study of over 100,000 penalties by InStat, about 75% end up in goal [1]
It's easy to argue therefore that they fulfill their objective within the rules of football: to concede significantly positive scoring odds to an opponent who has otherwise been denied the opportunity to do so.
From what perspective are most penalties poorly taken? Classical mechanics, aesthetics...?
Aesthetics wise. It's a 'penalty' shot, it'd be pretty ineffective penalty i.e. punishment if the shot wasn't often successful.
So I'm unhappy with the Aesthetics because keepers know it's largely successful and just guess and jump the gun (or study the stats of the takers and then... just guess) which in turn let's the the takers focus on faking out the keeper with stutter steps and weird run ups. I prefer to see penalties where the kicker focuses on the skill of putting it in a spot nd the keeper responds to that.
They instituted (or started enforcing) the rule that keepers can't jump off the line before the kick is taken. For purely aesthetic reasons, I'd like something similar so they react to the ball instead of guessing
The rule revision you're alluding to is merely focused on the statistical outcomes and advantage distributions, and not aesthetics.
> I prefer to see penalties where the kicker focuses on the skill of putting it in a spot nd the keeper responds to that
It's fine that you prefer this, but this isn't what the penalty rule is about. The rule is balanced so that you create a sufficient advantage for the taker. If you pile requirements on the taker, you probably need to compensate with other advantages (ex: take the penalty from 10m instead of 11m). I can see why this is not something that FIFA would want to touch, ever.
If you look at the numbers, a decently hard shot has the ball travel faster than 20 m/s, so the ball is at the goal line 0.5 seconds after the shot. Now, that means the goalie has to travel at something like 7 m/s. For comparison, the long jump world record traveled at 10 m/s, but not from a running start. [0] So allowing for reaction time and some delay because the ball need to travel a bit distance before one can see which direction it travels, it is simply not possible to react to a well shot penalty.
However, that is numbers for professional sports. In amateur, the ball will be shot at a somewhat lower velocity, and importantly, amateurs are a lot less likely to actually shoot a well placed penalty. So in lower leagues, it is a more reasonable strategy to try to react to the ball.
Most weak shots down the middle (by competent penalty takers that aren't a bag of nerves) are a conscious reaction to the keeper moving to the side the player hoped to slot his penalty.
If the keeper doesn't move, the ball is comfortably stroked/smashed past him on that side.
I have often thought about this, especially in penalty shoot outs where there are 4 people who aren't the "best" penalty taker that have to take one.
As has been mentioned there are penalties that are just unsaveable and against an elite penalty taker maybe a goalie is better off just picking a side and taking a chance against them but against the rest of the takers I'd be thinking eliminate the chance they get a freebie by diving too early or just picking a side and force them to score the hardest penalty possible
Perhaps goalies should treat penalties like free kicks i.e. the goalie doesn't stand at the center of the goal and offers a far corner for the kicker to aim at? The goalie knows exactly where the kicker should be placing the ball and if the kicker is perfect accurate it's a goal but if the kicker is off then the goalie should save it?
> Smashing a ball into the top corner [without needing to think about it] is also unsaveable and popular with elite penalty takers, but the margin for error in how you actually kick the ball is smaller: a slight miscue and your penalty is off target (or a "nice height" for a keeper that reads where you're shooting).
I like the fact, that penalties on the sides of the goal above a height of about 1,5m are unsaveable (you do not even have to hit the corner), but still world-class players miss, because they get nervous, so they often do not dare to just do that. It should be a game like tic tac toe: Totally solved, the keeper should lose every round, but yet he does not. Makes the game human.
Expert athletes are able to offload much of the mental processing of their game to the subconscious. We all do this to some degree (most of us aren't solving differential equations in real time to catch a ball), but great athletes are able to do this for many more sport specific tasks than casual players.
That's a wonderful video. What a talent. Reminded me of a product I read about a while ago - https://www.bernell.com/product/STROBE/Vision_Therapy_BestSe... - the glasses flicker between clear and not so you learn to interpret the motion of the ball rather than relying on vision alone. Very cool!
The line between experts and non-experts is how they manage.
I’m a little league coach, currently with 9-10 year olds. Once the kids get comfortable with basic mechanics, the real challenge of the game is not thinking about mechanics, while thinking about the tactical picture.
It’s difficult - in our case right now, working with a talented pitcher who starts to panic and throws wild when she gets rattled in the game (by a walk, hit, etc).
The joyous part as a coach is that with repetition and support, the kids figure it out! That cycle continues.
I loved coaching baseball for that age group. For our local rec league levels that is the first entry to kid-pitch.
It was really off-putting how outcome focused some of our other coaches were. I am a player development nerd (Driveline youth certified now - highly recommended - and love their philosophy shaped to rec players) and hated playing teams with coaches that tried to manipulate our player draft process to vacuum up all the better athletes. Those were the teams that would max out their two pitchers' pitch counts every game and cycle all the non-starters on their team through right field.
I moved onto softball coaching at our local middle school and enjoy player development and coaching at that level too. We lost this year to pandemic closures but I am looking forward to going full-on gamified tech next year (Blast sensors, pocket radar, lots of quick fun drills to keep things moving).
I think a lot of amateur pool players will feel that. They get into a rhythm and start potting everything. Then they either beak the rhythm, get a difficult shot, or notice their success, over think it all and mess up the mechanics.
This analogy doesn't go particular far, but it works to explain the difference between conscious and subconscious mechanical focus.
Inner game mastery seems like staying focused on not thinking about the mechanical aspects... "in the zone."
Like, do you even know your ATM PIN? Could you think of it consciously without pressing in the air? How about your computer password? Has it become "muscle-memory," learned subconsciously as motions while semantic symbols are discarded?
I have a theory that how good someone is at something (soccer, the piano, programming) is directly tied to what they can put into their subconscious brain. The more that you can do subconsciously the better you are.
I realized this after thinking about skills like dribbling in basketball where first you get plain dribbling into your subconscious, then more complex dribbling, then entire moves.
Athletes always talk about when “the game started slowing down” and I always wondered if this was pushing a lot of faculties into their subconscious so they could operate at that speed.
A reasonable and forum-appropriate analogy might be touch-typing.
In the nanosecond at which the lights go out, Ronaldo's brain has finished (the equivalent of) considering the concept of "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" and engaged the autopilot for reifying that into keystrokes while at the same point the amateur soccer player is still doing (the equivalent of) a hunt-and-peck for the "T" key.
Wow very nice video. I have been drinking too much ML koolade and gradually disenchanted about human capabilities. This is an example that human capabilities are still something one don't need to feel inferior to machine. I.e., I think the current ML tech can predict trajectory equally well. But there is nothing super human.
I've always wanted to see an experiment to see if free kicks (or teed golf shots, or a teed football) performance went down if the athlete was not allowed to set or tee the ball themselves. Soccer players will always give the ball a gentle toss onto the ground and watch it settle; do world class athletes "see" the millimeter differences in the ball position and subconsciously take into account before striking??
Perfect practice makes perfect. It is important to think and analyze, to correct bad habits. But once you've got the basics down, you then need to learn to let go and trust muscle memory. If you jump straight into "don't overthink it" while you're still making newbie mistakes, then practice is actually harmful and will impede further skill development
I'm going to press X to doubt since this looks like a load. Too many variables missing up to and including a player just not being good at spot kicks despite their obvious technical ability.
A great book on this subject is Chatter[0] by Ethan Kross, he talks about how our inner voice can often be our own worst enemy and also suggests ways to combat it.
Humor aside, it does raise a legitimate question regarding stereotypes -- there may be very good (biological, psychological) reasons that correlate athleticism with not-so-impressive cognitive skills.
Unfortunately PK takers are human too so they can get psych'd out by the goalkeeper who steps towards them to delay the time to take the PK. Probably a more important stat is how many PKs are scored the longer the ball sits on the penalty circle? As the feeling is that the longer it is the more likely the PK taker will bottle it and hit it over the bar.
There was a paper in Nature where scientists did magnetic imaging of the brain of grandmaster chess players, as well as of advanced amateur players.
They found that when evaluating a move, for grandmasters the
frontal and parietal cortices had gamma bursts, whereas for amateurs the medial temporal lobe had gamma bursts. This tends to indicate that when grandmasters evaluate a move they are accessing their memory, whereas an amateur evaluating a move is reasoning about it.
It is the same principle for tennis players when they do a down the line forehand passing shot from running, it is all muscle memory, it is one of the shots that has higher chances of missing if the player gets too much time to think about it.
Not quite the same, but this is like me walking down the stairs and becoming conscious of my walking. I end up overthinking my steps and have to go more slowly otherwise I risk missing a step and falling.
Hardly surprising since penalties are very easy to score if the player hits the ball properly and the keeper doesn't move before the kick (which would trigger a penalty repeat).
There's one rule to score a penalty 100% of times: keep the ball ground level and aim near one of the goal posts base. If the kicker doesn't screw up, then it's a goal, no matter how good and well trained is the keeper: there's just not enough time to go there, that's why the secret is keeping the ball low: you can fight gravity with a strong high or lateral jump, but you can't help gravity by adding more force to the gravity pulling you down.
Once this has become automatic, the player only has to keep cold and ignore the keeper, which naturally will do anything to distract him, therefore it's only a matter of making the thing automatic and don't think about it. Mental coaching, which recently has become a thing in football too, can help with this.
The keeper can move. The penalty would be repeated if he doesn't have one foot on the line. There's plenty of GKs that start their jump movement before the ball is kicked.
Misleading title, the study didn't demonstrate anything about the amount of brain activity, but the locale of brain activity. From the study;
> Players who were successful under pressure showed most of their activity in the motor cortex of the brain. This is the part of the brain active during movement.
> Players who were unsuccessful showed elevated activity in the pre-frontal cortex and left temporal cortex areas of the brain.
If anything, this demonstrates the difference between "computational cognition" vs "embodied cognition", latter being more adaptive in this particular task.
That said, I find the explanation of the researchers dubious; we don't know if doing prefrontal computation is hampering motor performance or it is simply trying to compensate a deficiency in the procedural knowledge of the player. Considering the fact that half of the participants were selected from inexperienced players, and the average participant age was around 22, the latter is the more likely explanation.
A slight tangent, but it's amazing what the human mind can do in the background. We've all had this experience driving - an amazingly complex task - where you get to your destination you forget how you got there. Well, the best freestyle rapper in the world right now is similar and on YouTube: Harry Mack. Before going on with your day, I promise it's worth your time to check him out: https://youtu.be/U6dbmuCfdyk?t=753. He's amazing. In other videos, he breaks down how he does what he does, and so much of his rap is automatic. This is the only way. He's thinking 2 or 3 bars ahead at all times while speaking what's been decided. He's trying to remember key words and string together stories and structure, while at the same time letting his background processes create the rhythm and specifics. What talent.
If you 'think' about how you 'walk across the room' - you don't do it naturally.
You don't 'win' during the 'game' - you 'win' during practice, when you are teaching your body all of the skills, and how to score like a walk across the room.
There's nothing you can do at 'game time' but to literally let your subconscious use what it's learned.
Golf is I think the game with the most subtle and minute aspects to that, and you can see the players are so keen on ritual, consistency, routine. 'Everything in it's right place' before the match and you're thinking is calm.
The best penalty taker I ever saw was Alan Shearer(English Footballer). He's just pick his spot and smash it as hard as he could. He was very successful.
Disclaimer, I haven't played soccer in 15 years, but I've played some and watched a lot :)
It is actually pretty hard to miss the box on the penalty kick if you are aiming at the box, as opposed to e.g. aiming for the bottom left corner. Then, (given ~equal skill levels) it is pretty much impossible to react to a strong penalty kick and still have time to dive, given the speed and distance - that's why many goalkeepers guess; the stronger the kick, the harder to react. And, as far as I could tell many players have obvious generic "tells" based on how their body, foot etc. align, and especially where they look before and during the run, so that improved guessing. So the best strategy is a strong kick, and deciding the general direction randomly at the last moment. Note how many penalty kicks on the highest levels of play go straight down the middle of the goal, with the goalkeeper diving away from what might seem like an "easy" one to deflect.
But if you do something clever and aim, then you are more likely to make the kick weaker, miss, or allow the goalkeeper to guess your plan.
I look at it like any skill worth mastering is worth training until doing without conscious effort.
Like walking, talking, riding a bicycle, dancing, BJJ, MMA, witty-banter, or chatting-up one's preferred amorous demographic: conscious thinking is nervous, insecure, self-doubting, clumsy, ungraceful... and just plain bad.
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