The Germans too?

There is a heightened drama to penalty shots in football that other sports are understandably eager to appropriate. But recall the sudden death that an India-Pakistan match in the inaugural Twenty20 world championships in 2007 went to,and you can see why the magic is not so easily imported. Having tied in normal time,the two teams had to nominate players to hit the stumps by turn. And while the contest was nailbitingly tense,it was just a game of chance,not footballs hyper-focus that tests even the viewers concentration. And since then T20 has found other ways of settling a tie.

But even by World Cup footballs rich record of penalty drama,last weeks spectacle of a German player missing a penalty against Serbia was a moment for the record books. A German,Lukas Podolski,had failed to net a penalty in regular time at the World Cup for the first time in 36 years. Lets be clear what we are discussing here. Germans are the masters of efficiency,and it is to their accomplishment analysts have looked these past weeks as they rolled in the advice to footballers especially,it has to be said,the penalty-phobic English. A penalty in football,some point out,is as close as it gets to testing a players capacity to put himself in the zone that state of total concentration untouched by thoughts on what the repurcussions of how it goes may be. Its essentially a mind game.

German footballers are not meant to lose it from here. But the fact that Podolski did what he did and that,unlike 36 years ago,his teammates did not efficiently rise to the occasion and pull off a victory anyway may be a heartening sign. Could it be that the Germans have finally succumbed to the globalisation of the game?