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"  It might be the most pressure-filled moment in all of sports: a penalty-kick shootout to decide a World Cup soccer match. When two teams are tied at the end of regulation in an elimination game in the World Cup, the outcome of the game is decided with five alternating penalty kicks. The shootout is remarkable for the way in which it turns the game on its head. International soccer is so dominated by defense that two of the last four World Cup finals were tied at the end of regulation and decided on penalty kicks, and in the last five finals the eventual losers scored a combined total of one goal during regulation. But during the shootout, the advantage shifts to the shooter, and if the goalie can make even a single save\u2014or cause the shooter to miss the shot\u2014that often decides the game.  Penalty kicks are taken from a distance of 12 yards away from the goal. The strongest shooters can kick at speeds of up to 80 mph. This means that the ball reaches the goal line in 500 milliseconds. A goalkeeper takes 600 milliseconds to move from the center of the 24-foot-wide goal to one of the posts. In short, a well-struck shot is all but guaranteed to be a goal. A study of 138 penalty shots in World Cup Finals games between 1982 and 1994 suggests that even world-class goalies aren&amp;#039;t able to buck these odds. They guessed the direction of the kick only 41 percent of the time\u2014slightly worse than random chance. And they stopped only 14.5 percent of the shots. A 1997 rule change designed to give goalies a fighting chance in a shootout may have actually made it worse for goalies. Until then the goalie had to remain stationary in the center of the goal until the ball was struck. The rule change allowed goalies to move from side to side at will, although they were still not allowed to move forward toward the shooter. This rule change gave rise to a devastating move by shooters called the paradinha, or &amp;quot;little stop.&amp;quot; Brazil&amp;#039;s best penalty kickers are now doing a stutter step and sometimes even faking a kick in an attempt to get the goalie to commit to one side or the other. The international soccer governing body, FIFA, added a clarification to the penalty kick rule this year: &amp;quot;Feinting in the run-up to take a penalty kick to confuse opponents is permitted, however, feinting to kick the ball once the player has completed his run-up is now considered an infringement of Law 14 and an act of unsporting behavior for which the player must be cautioned.&amp;quot; During this year&amp;#039;s World Cup, it will fall to the individual referees to determine the legality of any given shot\u2014a stutter during the run-up is legal but a stutter during the shot itself is not\u2014with a violation resulting in a yellow card for the shooter. FIFA plans to address the legality of the paradinha, which is widely used in Latin America but rarely used in Europe, sometime next year.  An English researcher argues that in this kind of high-pressure situation, the shooter should simply ignore the goalie. In an article to be published in the Journal of Sports Sciences, Exeter University psychologist Greg Wood gathered 18 university-level soccer players and outfitted them with equipment that tracked their eye movements. Shooters who were focusing on the goalie were turned away 40 percent of the time, compared with 20 percent of the time for calmer shooters who were able to ignore the goalie. &amp;quot;When players are anxious, they&amp;#039;re more likely to worry about the goalkeeper,&amp;quot; he told the Guardian. He adds that goalkeepers can enhance the effect\u2014and win the shootout\u2014by actively distracting the shooter, citing the example of Liverpool&amp;#039;s Bruce Grobbelaar, who did a wobbly leg dance during a 1984 European Cup, and Liverpool&amp;#039;s Jerzy Dudek, who waved his arms during the 2005 European Cup Final. &amp;quot;If the goalkeeper can make himself more threatening,&amp;quot; Wood says, &amp;quot;he is likely to capture the attention of the kicker even further.&amp;quot;      A blatant example of paradinha, at 0:50. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/sports/a5864/world-cup-penalty-kick-physics/>