Gabriel, Eberechi Eze, penalties and the brutal reality of being a footballer

Gareth Southgate couldn’t sleep when he put his head on the pillow and, unfortunately for him, he didn’t have any animals to talk to about his problem the next day.

“I lay awake that night and thought, ‘What will people think of me now?’ and it was frightening,” the former England international said. “Stuart Pearce had said to me, ‘Gareth, tomorrow I’m going home to feed my horses. I’ll look at them and say, ‘We lost to Germany on penalties again’. And they’ll answer, ‘What do we care? Give us some carrots now’.”

Southgate told that story to a German journalist a couple of months after England’s Euro 96 semi-final defeat at Wembley, in an interview that read like (and only Southgate knows whether this was the case or not) a form of therapy for him on the back of his penalty miss in sudden death.

“Living with it,” Southgate told the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, “is extremely difficult.”

‘It’ sounds like some form of illness. Or a bereavement. Instead, Southgate was talking about kicking a ball from 12 yards towards a goal and the consequences of it not ending up in the back of the net.

Pearce was right that his horses didn’t care about the outcome. But the problem is that Southgate did care, and so did all his teammates and the England supporters.

It was no different when Pearce’s spot kick was saved in a World Cup semi-final shootout six years earlier. Pearce was a football hard man in the days when that was genuinely a thing, but he walked back to the halfway line at Italia 90 wondering if he would ever recover from his miss, and broke down in tears on the pitch moments later.

Those two penalties are a long time ago now, and football isn’t the same game — watch the Vinnie Jones documentary on Netflix if you want confirmation of that, or think about VAR, all the other law changes and the gross influx of money from far and wide.

But one thing that hasn’t altered in the slightest in the 30 years or so since — and never will unless someone comes up with a better solution to decide a match that’s all level after extra time — is the cruel and brutal reality of the penalty shootout. One player, maybe more, is guaranteed to end up carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders for years to come for failing to execute an individual action in a team sport. That responsibility, and the realisation of it, is absolutely crushing.

“I feel I have let everybody down and this hurts me more than anything,” John Terry said after missing a penalty for Chelsea to win the Champions League final in 2008 — a shootout that Manchester United subsequently won in sudden death.

“What happened will haunt me for the rest of my life,” Terry added.

Four years later, when Chelsea triumphed in a Champions League final penalty shootout against Bayern Munich, the Croatian Ivica Olic was one of two players to miss for the German side. “I will never forget this sad night,” Olic said.

At some point, when everything is not quite so raw, Eberechi Eze and Gabriel will probably bare their soul in a similar way too. Whether it takes them days or years to say what is on their mind doesn’t really matter, because everyone has a good idea how the two Arsenal players are feeling right now anyway.

A mixture of pain, anguish and despair was written over their faces after a 120-minute final for the biggest prize in European club football, at the end of a 63-game season for Arsenal that started last August, was defined by one penalty that went wide and another that sailed over the crossbar.

Forget the match itself, the fact that Arsenal took the lead inside six minutes, or that Paris Saint-Germain enjoyed 75 per cent possession — scrap the analysis full stop. The only narrative that really matters, the only story that will be told in years to come, surrounds the two penalty kicks that Arsenal missed and the fact that PSG won a shootout without their goalkeeper making a save.

“They’re devastated,” said the Arsenal midfielder Declan Rice on TNT Sports, when asked about Gabriel and Eze. “We love them. We’re with them. That happens in football. They’re not going to be the last players to miss penalties in finals. Without them, we wouldn’t have won the Premier League, that’s for sure. Gabriel, I’ve run out of words for him as a person and as a player. Eze as well, the crucial goals he’s come up with for us this season. It happens. It’s football, it’s cruel. But we take the positives and we keep going.”

As a neutral, a part of you often feels that it’s better if more than one player misses for a team in a shootout, so that the burden is shared. In the last Champions League final to be decided by a penalty shootout, when Atletico Madrid lost to Real Madrid back in 2016, Juanfran was not so fortunate. The Atletico Madrid defender was the only player not to score, striking the base of the post with his penalty. Small margins, huge consequences.

A couple of days later, Juanfran wrote an emotional letter to the Atletico Madrid supporters. “I will never forget your displays of affection when I came to ask for forgiveness,” he said. “Seeing my tears reflected in the faces of the thousands of Atleticos that packed that end of the stadium helped me cope with the tremendous sadness.”

It’s hard to imagine a player ever going to those lengths if he missed a gilt-edged chance, or even a penalty, in normal or extra time in a final, but everything changes with a penalty shootout.

There’s something about that long and lonely walk from the centre circle, followed by the psychological battle between the penalty taker and the goalkeeper as the ball is placed on the spot, that creates a sense of theatre and drama that turns every kick into an act of torture for the player involved.

“There are four phases of a penalty shoot-out,” Geir Jordet, a sports psychologist and professor at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, told Ben Lyttleton in his excellent book Twelve Yards. “The hanging around in the centre circle hoping not to catch the eye of the manager, the walk to the penalty spot, the kick, and the walk back after you’ve missed. They are all stressful in their own ways.”

All of which makes you wonder why anyone volunteers to take one in the first place, let alone a centre back. In the case of Gabriel, who defended heroically against PSG and has been such an integral part of Arsenal’s title-winning team, the fifth penalty was his choice and, in the words of his manager Mikel Arteta, a moment that he had “prepared and trained for”.

It turned out to be the final act of the game in Budapest as Gabriel became the first player to hit a penalty over the crossbar in a Champions League final shootout since Serginho for Milan in 2005.

As Gabriel walked away covering his face with his hands, the PSG players, substitutes and staff ran to the same end of the pitch, jumping for joy at the sight of his wayward penalty and wildly celebrating a second successive Champions League triumph in front of their own supporters. Their reaction was totally understandable, and any team would have done the same.

But amid the chaos was an act of sportsmanship that also didn’t go unnoticed. Marquinhos, the PSG captain, was the first person to console Gabriel, wrapping his arms tightly around his Brazil teammate like a father comforting his son. There was nothing performative about Marquinhos’ actions. He was, quite simply, looking out for a friend.