Advance Cues In Soccer Penalty Kicks
Soccer is one of the most-watched sports in the world. It brings millions of people together and creates bonds that spread over oceans. In soccer, there are several instances in which a split second can change the game. A penalty kick is one of these moments. According to FIFA, in the 2014 World Cup, penalty kicks averaged 70 mph. The ball reaches the goal in less than 400 milliseconds. For a goalkeeper to fully extend to one side, it takes about 500 milliseconds. That means that a fastball near the post is mathematically impossible to reach unless the goalkeeper guesses correctly and starts moving before the ball is kicked. So how does the goalkeeper know what side to move before the ball is kicked? Is it just luck or is there a specific strategy a goalkeeper uses?
The study at hand is to answer the following question: What is the role that advance cues play in the decision-making of a goalkeeper during a penalty kick, specifically upper vs lower body cues. Before diving in, let’s define what exactly a penalty kick is. A penalty kick is given when a player commits a foul (direct free kick) inside his or her 18-yard box. The opponent’s goalkeeper must remain on the goal line, facing the kicker, until the ball is kicked. The kicker must score from 12 yards away from the goal (Law 14: The Penalty Kick, n.d.). The kicker and the goalkeeper are the only players allowed in the penalty area. The other players must be outside the penalty area. The keeper’s decision consists of several factors, one of them being advance cues. Professional goalkeepers initiate their response/decision before the impact of the ball. Advance cues refer to the goalkeeper’s ability to make accurate predictions based on the contextual information available before the player kicks the ball. Advance cues are a significant component when anticipating what will happen. They are visual information that allows players to predict what will happen before the action begins. Advance cues are often essential to a successful performance because the action happens so fast. With this extra information available, athletes still need to make a decision. The following studies help frame the approach for the current study.
An initial analysis was done prior to this study where penalties from the English Premier League from 2014 to 2018 were examined. Bleacher Report described the English Premier League as the top football league in the world. The league has 1.33 goals per game, 0.06 red cards per game, 26 continental wins, and a 31-point differential. From the 360 penalties taken 274 were scored, 19 were missed, and 67 were saved from the keeper. In the 2016-2017 season, goalkeepers guessed the correct side 42 times from the 106 penalties taken. That is only 39%. The statistics show that expert goalkeepers need to improve their penalty kick performance. They must look for reliable information that can help them guide their decision to the correct side. One of the goals of this study is to help develop a goalkeeper training program to improve their penalty kick performance.
Many studies have focused on penalty kicks in soccer and have specially looked at the rationale and thought process of a goalkeeper. For example, Ona, Raya, and Bilbao investigated the effects of providing advance cues during a penalty kick and measured the kicker’s rate of success. The point of the study is the effect of explicitly providing the goalkeeper’s movement advanced cue to the kicker during a real penalty kick task was assessed. These professional players have at least ten years of experience and more than 10,000 hr. of practice. Providing an advance cue significantly improved the player's rate of success relative to players without the advance cue. This shows that providing advanced movement cues helped the experimental group to increase its decision time significantly, suggesting cognitive adaption to the detection of a cue and making a decision.
Williams and David’s study investigated the relationship between visual search strategy, selective attention, and expertise in soccer. Participants recruited consisted of 12 experienced and 12 less-experienced male soccer players. They were asked to anticipate pass destinations as quickly and accurately as possible. While there were no differences in search strategy in 3v3 situations, in1v1 situations, experienced players had a higher search rate, involving more fixations on shooter duration, and fixated longer on the hip region. The article indicated the hip region to be an area of importance in anticipating an opponent’s movement. It also mentions the advantage of using eye movements with more direct measures.
Johnston and Morrison looked at the application of naturalistic decision-making techniques to explore cues in rugby players. The purpose of this study was to see the types of the meaning of cues and how it varied between the skill level of the player. It was also anticipated that experts would practice greater cue discrimination than novices. Participants consisted of three players from a semi-professional club and seven players from a professional club. Participants were put into four categories. Category one is representing the highest level of ability and Category 4 the lowest. Also, participants were part of cognitive task analysis. They were asked sixteen questions framed around a specific event that was recalled from memory by the individual. Following the cognitive task analysis, the participants were shown a picture stimulus depicting a scene from a professional rugby league game. They were asked to describe what they would do if they were part of the scene. Findings demonstrated differences in the number of cues used across player categories, with the highest category player reporting a reliance on fewer cues than the other players. Cues in rugby helped players make predictions of their opponent in the field.
Savelsbergh, Williams, Van Der Kamp, and Ward conducted a study in the Netherlands, where they investigated the effects of visual search, anticipation, and expertise in goalkeepers. Fourteen players participated where seven had played ten plus years in a semi-professional league and the other seven players less frequently, for fun. Participants were placed in two groups, the expert, and novice group, based on their experience. Experts and novices were then asked to move a joystick in response to penalty kicks presented on film. Visual search behavior was assessed using an eye movement registration system. Expert goalkeepers were more accurate in predicting the direction of the penalty kick than novice goalkeepers. A critical piece of information from this study is that the novice group fixated more on the trunk, arms, and hips (upper body) whereas the expert group paid attention to the kick and non-kicking leg (lower body) and ball. The findings in this study are interesting in that participants separated cues into categories.
Morris and Colenso's work looked at the anticipation of goalkeepers when facing right and left-footed penalty kicks, similar findings to the previous study were found. Subjects were shown a film with ten right-left footed penalty kicks and ten left-footed penalty kicks. A 2-way ANOVA indicated that anticipation of right footed-kicks was significantly better than left-footed kicks. Where this study connects with the previous one is that Post hoc interviews were conducted and revealed that participants used the angle of approach to the ball, foot position at contact, and hip position at the time of contact as their main cues (lower body). From these previous studies, we see how there is a reliance on these two types of cues, upper and lower.
Causer, Smeeton, and Williams looked at the effects of having penalties both spatially and temporally occluded on the ability of skilled and less skilled goalkeepers to predict their direction. Twenty-four goalkeepers were asked to look at a video on a projector, and they had to dive to the side the goalkeepers believed to the ball was traveling to. Participants were required to verbalize the side they were diving to. The clips the participants saw where either showed the full body of the kicker or only the hip section. The videos were also stopped at -240 ms before the kick or at 80ms before the kick. Findings showed how skilled goalkeepers used to hip region to accurately predict the direction of the penalty kick. Later temporal occlusions times were also associated with increased performance in the correction response and direction of the analyses.
Hunter, Murphy, Angilletta Jr, and Wilson's study focused on the effects of speed and technique of the kick on predicting the direction of a penalty kick. More than seven hundred participants were part of an online survey where they matched penalty shots from the point of view of a goalkeeper. Participants watched 60 videos of penalty kicks at different occlusion times (-0.4s to 0.0s) before the ball was kicked and needed to predict the direction of the kick. The kickers in the video were asked to kick in four different ways, left and side-foot; right and side-foot; left and instep; right and instep. Results showed that side-foot kicks were easier to predict when they were fast. Instep kicks were harder to predict slow or fast. It was also found the accuracy increased on videos where the occlusion time was closer to ball contact.
Dicks, Button, and Davids investigated the behaviors of goalkeepers in three situ conditions and two video simulation conditions. The three situ conditions were categorized into verbal, simplified body movement, and interceptive response followed by verbal and joystick movement response video simulations. Goalkeepers were asked to verbally judge the direction of the penalty kick without making any movements for the video simulation verbal and the in-situ verbal condition. In the video conditions, goalkeepers were asked to move to actually try to save the penalty kick. Findings showed that goalkeepers focus more on the penalty kick taker’s movement compared to the ball location. In the situ interceptions, goalkeepers spend the same amount of time looking at the penalty kicks movements and the ball location. The article mentioned that depending on the limitations of the experimental task, the gaze and movement behaviors function differently. From the findings, what is useful for the current study is how goalkeepers spend more time fixating on information from the kicker.
Smeeton and Williams's study looked at how a human movement that has deception about the outcome is thought to be different from a non-deceptive movement. Skilled and less-skilled soccer players were asked to look at temporally occluded deceptive, non-deceptive, and non-deceptive exaggerated penalty kicks. Participants looked at the penalty kick videos and were asked to judge the direction of the penalty kick and write down what their level of confidence was. Participants were overconfident when guessing the depictive kicks compared to the non-deceptive kicks. The confidence level and accuracy of 80 ms before ball contact in deceptive and non-deceptive exaggerated conditions showed a significant relationship with less skilled players.
Memmert, Hüttermann, Hagemann, Loffing, & Strauss developed a five-step process for goalkeepers to anticipate the direction of a kick in a penalty situation. The first step is to look at the orientation of the non-kicking foot. The second step is to look at the orientation or turning of the torso of the kicker. The third step is to look at the position of the support/non-kicking leg in relation to the ball. The last step is to look at the oblique run-up of the kicker. Collectively the movement features observed can be used by goalkeepers to anticipate the kick. Looking at the technique, cues from the hip up and down are used to determine the direction of the kick. From this information, there is a combination of upper and lower body cues used to establish a successful performance during a penalty kick as a goalkeeper.
From this research, two concepts have been presented. The first is that advance cues are critical when it comes to making a decision. In the CTA from Johnston and Morrison's study, we saw that higher skilled players do use anticipation skills when judging a play. From the last two studies, it is noted that advanced cues are broken down in two areas, the upper and lower body. The upper body consists of, the trunk, arms, head, and lower of legs and feet. The lower body was shown effective in Savelsbergh, Williams, Van Der Kamp, & Ward and McMorris and Colenso, it is hypothesized that lower body cues will be more effective in deciding the kick of a penalty than upper body cues. For the structure of this study, a combination of Hunter et al. and Causer, Smeeton, and Williams will be used. The survey approach similar to Hunter’s work and the procedure of producing the test film from Causer, Smeeton, and Williams are two main focuses. The take ways are advanced cues can be divided into two categories, and the current study will test those against each other.
