earleyroyal The fault for a player missing a penalty lies with the media? I thought our top professionals were paid to put distractions like that out of their mind?
All you ever hear from the Media is 'saved'. Our whole country's attitude to pens is wrong.
Even tonight, John Barnes was saying what a great save by Gomes for Jenas's pen....... no John, it was a sh*t pen. Unless you watch the keeper and dink it the other way (like a couple tonight), you should have the bottle to place your pen in an unsaveable place. Our players never do, we just kick it at the goal and hope the keeper goes the wrong way.
If a pen is saved, it is not a good save by the keeper it is a sh*t pen.
This was shown when we went out to Portugal a few years back. Some English uni had doen research on pens and had worked out the areas of a goal where, if you place your pen, it is unsaveable. They tried to give that data to the FA and were rebuffed. After we went out on Pens, one of the papers had superimposed ours and Portogals pens onto the graphic. iirc NONE of our pens were in the unsaveable zone, wereas all but one of portugal's were in it.
To place a pen in an unsaveable spot you have to run the risk of missing the goal and every players knows they will get savaged for missing the goal. You hear from commentators time and time again when it happens that "you have to get it on target and make the keeper make a save", "its criminal to miss the goal", "if you hit the target you've always got a chance" etc.......
Our players are all too aware of this and so our crap pens continue.
I don't for a second think our players dont have the quality to put the ball in the corner (esp high), but they do lack the bottle to try
I didn't think Gravesen took one, come to think of it I missed Everton's 1st as I was tryimg to synchronise the 2 shootouts 
