It may be a little histrionic to call it a pandemic, but something has been shifting lately in the see-saw of power that is football’s ultimate one-on-one duel.
Perhaps we should just call it a ‘pen-demic’, the decline in effectiveness of some of the game’s coolest footballers at converting penalty kicks.
When the Manchester City goalkeeper Willy Caballero faced Barcelona’s Neymar at Camp Nou in the Uefa Champions League last Wednesday night, with the best part of 90,000 fans backing the Brazil captain as he lined up to take a spot-kick, who was favourite to win their one-on-one?
A reserve goalkeeper, on as a substitute for a team losing 3-0, or the homeground hero?
Easy. Neymar stared at Cabellero, started his pitter-patter, short-strided run up and promptly planted a tame shot to Cabellero’s left. Once the keeper had moved in the correct direction, Caballero made a straightforward save.
At Barcelona, widely regarded as owners of the most potent goalscoring unit in the game, penalties are becoming a bugbear.
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Last season, of the 24 spot-kicks awarded to a team whose slickness and dominant share of possession means they draw a large number of fouls, only 15 were scored. Neymar and Lionel Messi were the most frequent villains.
Barca are not alone among elite clubs for not making enough capital of what football’s lawmakers designed as a device to give maximum advantage to those who have, by an infringement, been denied a strong goalscoring opportunity.
Ask Caballero’s City colleagues. Last Saturday, City, the leaders of the Premier League, contrived, in 90 minutes against Everton, to miss two chances from the penalty spot.
First Kevin De Bruyne, usually superb with a dead-ball, had a penalty saved by Everton’s Maarten Stekelenburg. The Dutch goalkeeper, making a similar dive to his left, then denied Sergio Aguero from the spot. It was Aguero’s second such failure in the space of week, having messed up a spot-kick for Argentina in World Cup qualifying.
Aguero is on a bad run as a penalty specialist. He is in good company. Even Mario Balotelli’s recent renaissance, since joining French pacesetters Nice, has been blemished by one of his penalties being saved. The Italian has many foibles, but he has long been regarded as almost impeccable as a spot-kick expert.
Across the leading leagues of Europe, goalkeepers are enjoying a boom period in penalty showdowns.
Nearly three in ten of the penalties awarded in the Premier League so far in 2016/17 have not led to goals; the statistics for the Primera Liga, Serie A and the Bundesliga are tipped even further in favour of the defending team.
As for the Champions League, Caballero was last week joined by Juventus’s Gigi Buffon in making a save from a spot-kick — Buffon denied Lyons’ Alex Lacazette — and keeping the penalty-takers’ overall success rate so far this term in that competition below 50 per cent.
It is enough to spread a phobia. And if there is one keeper who makes the knees of penalty-takers tremble more than any other, it is the man Barcelona’s spot-kickers, like Messi and Neymar, face on Saturday, when they go to Valencia.
Diego Alves has come to regard a personal success rate of 50 per cent in penalty duels as just about par.
The Brazilian has faced 43 spot-kicks in his nine years playing in Spain, and saved 21 of them, including two in one game earlier this month against table-topping Atletico Madrid.
Alves, who was second-choice keeper for Valencia at the outset of the season but has regained the gloves since September, now holds the all-time record in Spanish football for the number of penalty saves.
His list of conquests is stellar. He has saved twice from Cristiano Ronaldo in matches against Real Madrid, and has thwarted Messi.
His secret? “Nothing special,” he says, “but is something I have been good at since I was young.”
Alves, 31, no giant, tends to raise one arm, move a little on his line as his adversary tees up the shot. He often gives the spot-kicker a formidable stare.
But he still feels like the underdog in each dead-ball contest.
“The goal is a vast target,” he adds, “and the taker has a huge chance.”
These days, it feels like a diminished one.
Player of the week — Carlos Bacca (AC Milan)
“He’s like a bird of prey,” says Gigi Buffon, the Juventus captain and goalkeeper, of Carlos Bacca, the AC Milan striker. Buffon has done his homework ahead of Saturday’s San Siro collision between the two most decorated clubs in modern Italian football. He knows that keeping in-form Bacca off the scoresheet will be quite a personal triumph.
Rare ratio
Buffon, speaking ahead of the meeting between the clubs positioned third and first in Serie A, noted that Bacca, who has six goals in a season where he has so far started six matches, is establishing some eye-catching statistics in his second campaign with the rossoneri. “They say he’s scoring with every other shot,” noted the Juventus veteran. “That’s ominous.”
Opportunist
In fact, the boffins who monitor the Italian top-flight’s finer details reckon that Bacca has had just 13 shots at goal so far this term for his half-dozen goals. He’s on almost exactly a goal every 90 minutes, the most productive run of what has been a career spent eking out opportunities that were sometimes hard to grasp.
Humble start
Bacca, born on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, had a tough start in life. His family struggled to make ends meet, and while he dreamed of a career as a footballer, he needed to supplement the family income as a teenager by selling fish by the side of the road and, into his early 20s, working as a ticket-seller for the local bus authority.
Late developer
While he always had pace, determination and what has become his distinctive ability to find space behind defences, he rose through the ranks of the sport gradually, rather than meteorically. He spent a number of seasons in the second tier of Colombian football, and even moved to the Venezuelan league in search of playing time.
Bruges breakthrough
He came to wider international attention once he was scoring regularly for Junior de Barranquilla, the club he grew up supporting. He won his first Colombia cap in 2010, but would soon realise that in the Colombia of Radamel Falcao and the likes of Jackson Martinez, starts at centre-forward for his country would be hard won. He was 25 when he first played in Europe, for Belgium’s Bruges, who signed him in late 2011.
Star of Sevilla
After hitting 25 goals in 35 Belgian league games in his first full season at Bruges, the famously sharp-eyed Sevilla scouts pounced, and made Bacca a star in Spain. He won two Europa League titles with Sevilla, scored prolifically and when a relatively cash-strapped Milan last year looked at his €30m buyout clause, they spied good value even for a 29-year-old. Bacca turned 30 last month, and is looking a better and better investment with almost every outing.
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