What did he contribute to any team?
He was an ice cold penalty taker. And thick as fuck.
Oh - ok.
He was clean through there 1 v 1 in one of the Euro 2012 knock out games and blasted the ball in the top corner from about 25 yards, the repercussions of skying it didn’t even occur to him.
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Brendan Rodgers thought he was Sun Tzu when he got Ballotelli back to mark on a corner.
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Your man Johnathan Wilson takes the biscuit. Waffling on about the impact of some game from the 50s while talking about how pep fraudiola changed football forever.
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I hate when pundits or commentators try to describe what top level players are thinking when they do a certain action. 99% of it is instinct and muscle memory. Players aren’t going through a regular thought process.
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Sure there was some guesser on the radio and they asked him about yamals goal and he said I was lucky I had my head to see it I’m usually buried in a laptop trying to write a piece 
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Even with the likes of Graham hunter you could have a laugh at him.
I’ll never forget him previewing an el Classico on Newstalk and he couldn’t pick a winner because he had such great friends in both dressing rooms 
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With a penalty in a shoot out you have to think. You have time to think. And you get one shot at it. That introduces a major degree of psychology, and the potential for a catastrophic failure of nerve. It becomes like a crucial golf putt, and we all know with golf putts, nerve is everything.
Say with Akanji of Switzerland, there’s no way his nerve didn’t fail him. His penalty was so bad. He just did a crap little short run up and meekly tipped it to Pickford. His thought process, whatever it was, was catastrophic.
Instinct and muscle memory apply when you have no time to think. Conscious thinking is the enemy of the sportsperson. Automatic pilot “thinking” ie. thinking without thinking, is the goal. But nerves can also play a part in play when you have no time to think. Like, when Clare saw Limerick coming at them in that round robin game this year, psychology absolutely kicked in. Psychology injected energy into Limerick’s legs and sapped it from Clare’s. David Brady said something that always stuck with in that House Of Pain book, about when Kerry had Mayo on the run in the first halves of the 2004 and 2006 All-Ireland finals, the Mayo players could feel their legs turning to jelly out on the pitch.
The constant focus om “process” is an attempt to remove conscious thinking. But sportspeople are only human. You can’t completely remove conscious thinking, it’s impossible, humans are not robots.
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I wasn’t talking about penalty shootouts, i meant from open play. It was more a general observation, than on the Palmer posts
The problem with you, son, is that all your brains are in your head.
Bill Shankly
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At least a nobody who isnt a Lol league bluffer
And here you are telling us what they are or aren’t thinking.
Sadlier and Ken early absolutely seething over the appointment.
So I’m now fully 100 percent the big Icelander.
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darragh maloney was explaining to Ray Houghton how pressurized penalties were during 1 game
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A lot of the seethe stems from the fact that they’ve mentioned about a thousand lads for the job but none of them predicted the fella that actually got it
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Ya they are all raging the FAI was able to shut them out of the process and keep stum
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I think Ray came back at him and said “I know”.
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The LOI teams went head to head with equivalents in Gibraltar this week and came out with a creditable 2-1 win and brave 2-0 defeat. Both lucky they didn’t have to face the crack Lincoln Red Imps outfit