Stephen Halliday: Blatter wide of mark over penalty shoot-outs

HAVING played as a centre-forward in the Swiss amateur leagues before turning his attention to a more profitable career in law and sports administration, Sepp Blatter might be expected to fully appreciate that the “essence of football” is surely the ability to direct the ball between a set of posts and crossbar which are eight feet high and eight yards wide.

Yet according to Blatter, it is this very essence which the game loses whenever a match has to be decided by a penalty shoot-out, prompting the Fifa president to ask Franz Beckenbauer and his Football Task Force to come up with a better alternative.

Perhaps the 76-year-old ruler of world football would prefer a return to the pre-1970s system of drawing lots or tossing a coin to find a winner in a drawn tie. It was because of this highly unsatisfactory and purely luck-based method, of which Italy were the highest-profile beneficiaries when they defeated the Soviet Union on a coin-toss in the semi-final of the 1968 European Championship finals, that ‘kicks from the penalty mark’ were introduced by the International Football Association Board.

Since then, penalty shoot-outs are routinely and lazily described as a “lottery” by commentators and pundits. On the contrary, they provide a platform for a match to be decided on football’s most basic skill and premise – scoring a goal.

Shoot-outs also provide unparalleled moments of tension, high drama and entertainment. Wembley delivered the latest of them on Saturday, Huddersfield winning the League One play-off final following an astonishing 22-kick shoot-out which culminated in Sheffield United goalkeeper Steve Simonsen blazing his effort over the crossbar.

As impossible as it was not to feel sympathy for Simonsen, it was a timely reminder that, not for the first time, Sepp Blatter is talking nonsense.