Former goalkeeper of the Russian national team Ruslan Nigmatullin spoke about the actions of the goalkeeper of the national team of Morocco, Yassin Bounou, in the penalty shootout in the match of the 1/8 finals of the World Cup against Spain (3:0).

– As for the goalkeeper of the Morocco national team, let’s do this – what is a penalty? Your task is to see the blow, react and perform a technical action: hit or catch. I saw, reacted, fought off – three actions. But it is during the penalty kick that the mechanics are different. First you need to try to deceive the opponent: to make certain deceptive movements. The Moroccan goalkeeper managed to bring down the opponent with his deceitful movements. The next thing is to guess the corner: choose it, first deceive and, accordingly, jump into this corner. Already two steps. And then everything is as usual: you are already in this corner – you saw it, reacted and beat it off. Or he saw the ball fly to another corner. So it’s not like a regular game. In addition, two actions appear, on which the success of the next three directly depends. It’s not enough to guess the angle. Even at this World Cup it was that the goalkeepers guessed, but it did not help them.

As a result: a penalty kick is not an ordinary football moment. This is a separate art form. Some people do it well, some worse. Often, even a very cool goalkeeper in a regular game has problems with penalties. The same De Gea: he has a complete problem with a penalty. He set anti-records for missed penalties. It also happens vice versa. For example, in the Netherlands national team there is only one main goalkeeper, and another is released on penalties – a specialist in this particular part of the game. – quotes the words of Nigmatulin “Championship”.

Morocco reached the quarter-finals of the World Cup for the first time in history. Portugal will be their next opponent at the 2022 World Cup.

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