Guessing right can spell disaster for pressurised goalies

WHEN I slip on the Superman jim-jams, pile an extra marshmallow into my Irish Examiner-branded mug of hot cocoa and pad up the stairs to bed with a water bottle tucked under my arm, I like to have a good book waiting on the bedside cabinet.

Who doesn’t like that, reader? At the moment — since you ask — I’m rattling through an oral history of the world’s largest and most powerful TV sports network, ESPN.

Those Guys Have All The Fun is the height of a small child but is a cracking trip through the past three decades in their weird, isolated base in Bristol, Connecticut.

It’s a great read despite its description of the station’s limited output during its nascent prefab-based, credit card-maxing days.

I have to say I laughed, when I read that subscribers watched: “Australian Rules football, Irish bicycling and, also from Ireland, Munster hurling — which has nothing to do with vomiting cheese... Hurling is an Irish variation on rugby with the same shirts and slightly different rules. For many years it had failed to take America by storm.”

Well, no. It isn’t any wonder, is it ESPN, that our wonderful ancient and indigenous game didn’t take off on the other side of the Atlantic when those broadcasting the action from Thurles thought a green flag indicated a try.

Nevertheless, from there, the channel grows, of course, to become the global powerhouse it is today with the NFL, baseball, the Olympics (most recently) and world soccer under its thumb.

A lot of the drama and best conversation throughout occurs over a beer, with the top presenters and producers often retiring to the chicken-wire bars of rural New England or the station car park for a post-Sports Center drink.

And it’s striking how many good ideas were pitched between gulps.

For those people I spoke to this week, it all also started over a post-work drink.

Four Dutch psychologists were sitting in a bar on a Friday evening after a long week inside other people’s minds.

Their national side was on the march towards an ill-fated World Cup final in South Africa and as the drama played out on screens above their heads the group discussed psychology and football’s mental litmus test: penalty shoot-outs.

Twelve months later we have new information should we ever stand on the edge of the box, three paces back from the spot, waiting for the ref’s whistle: keepers usually go right when the pressure’s on.

Marieke Roskes, a 27-year old academic in the University of Amsterdam, picks up her phone and fills me in.

“We were just chatting in the bar at the end of the week and talking about football and a couple of recent papers. Essentially it was about dogs.

“One of the papers someone mentioned showed that dogs tend to wag their tails to the right when approaching their masters as they come in from work maybe. It’s because they’re happy to see them and it kind of opens up the right-hand side of their brains.

“The other paper showed that goalies have a tendency to dive one way or another while facing penalty kicks — they seem to dislike staying still. So we thought — could football goalkeepers be like dogs?”

Marieke and her colleagues, Daniel Sligte, Shaul Shalvi and Carsten De Dreu, started examining the evidence the following Monday morning.

In what I’d class as not a bad start to any working week, they rewound each and every shoot-out at the World Cup — they found 204 amazingly.

As Jennifer Aniston would say in one of her shampoo adverts: “Here comes the science bit.”

When teams were tied, the researchers found that goalkeepers dived left and right equally. But when their teams were down — “when the pressure is on and the spotlight is on the goalie to get his team back in the game”, as Marike puts it — the psychologists discovered that goalkeepers were more than twice as likely to dive right as dive left.

Why? The same reason your dog — hopefully — wags his tail to the right when you come in from a day at the office. The same reason couples tilt their heads to the right when kissing.

“Among humans, dogs and other animals, individuals unconsciously move to the right when they approach something they want.”

The predisposition, they say, to go one way rather than another doesn’t mean that individuals always have to go that way. But it does mean they have an unconscious tendency to favour one side. Interestingly, the researchers concluded that there was an evolutionary advantage for many members of a given species to favour one direction rather than another.

Conclusion: because cavemen were chased clockwise by cheetahs thousands of years ago, Ian Harte missed his spotter in Japan.

And if you’re playing ball this week put any spotters to the keeper’s left. Or just welly it down the middle to be absolutely safe.

* Contact: [e-mail] Twitter: @adrianrussell