Euro 2012? ….England may be out but the statistics were not entirely out. In Ian McHale’s model, penalties were assumed to be 50-50. And as Roy Hodgson told BBC Sport earlier today: “A player’s reputation should not be forged on a penalty shoot-out, their reputation should be forged on the four games and in those four games we have not lost.”.

To find out more about a stats approach to penalty taking…and why, for example, it might help a penalty taker to look at a clock before he kicks the ball, read ’How to take a penalty: the hidden mathematics of sport’  by Rob Eastaway and John Haigh (republished as ‘Beating the Odds: the hidden maths of sport’). See also ‘What’s the point of probability?’ which gives us a few tips on penalty-taking.

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