\n<\/p>\n
H<\/span>annah Hampton had already saved one penalty in the shootout against Spain at Euro 2025 when Aitana Bonmat\u00ed, the back-to-back winner of the women\u2019s Ballon d\u2019Or, placed the ball on the spot and stepped back, taking a moment before the strike. Bonmat\u00ed thumped the ball hard and left, but Hampton was there, arms outstretched, to block the shot with both hands.<\/p>\n \u201cBetter pens than the last time, let\u2019s be honest!\u201d Hampton said after the match, a reference to the more painful shootout against Sweden in the quarter-final that went to sudden death before England prevailed. Hampton saved two penalties that time, too.<\/p>\n It was an extraordinary tournament for Hampton, the Chelsea player who only became England\u2019s first choice goalie in May after the retirement of Mary Earps from international football. Hampton\u2019s penalty-saving record is perhaps even more impressive given that doctors told her that, because of an eye condition, she wouldn\u2019t be able to play football.<\/p>\n Hampton was born with strabismus, or a squint, meaning that when she was looking at an object with one eye, the other would be looking in another direction. It was severe enough that she had three operations by the age of three to correct the misalignment. The surgery was not a complete success: Hampton told the i paper in 2022 how she would try to pour juice into a glass and miss if she wasn\u2019t holding it.<\/p>\n During a medical check-up at Stoke City, when Hampton was 12, doctors diagnosed another problem. She had impaired depth perception, meaning she struggles to tell how far away objects are. It is often seen in patients with strabismus.<\/p>\n \u201cDepth perception requires our eyes to be aligned, really from birth, and also for the visual input from the two eyes to be equal,\u201d says Prof Jugnoo Rahi, an ophthalmic epidemiologist at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health. If children have misaligned eyes, the brain suppresses the input from one eye because the brain cannot cope with double vision. \u201cIf that goes on for a long time, if you can\u2019t align the eyes through surgery, for example, then you get permanently reduced vision in one eye,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n But children who have limited depth perception grow up using other cues, the most obvious being that objects appear smaller when further away. It\u2019s often the finer perception tasks that are most affected \u2013 threading a needle more than intercepting a speeding football. \u201cPeople do learn,\u201d Rahi says, \u201cAnd I suspect if you\u2019re also particularly talented and your hand-eye coordination is good, you may be better able to overcome that.\u201d<\/p>\n From Stoke City to Aston Villa and Chelsea, Hampton has certainly learned. After countless bloody noses and broken fingers from stopping the ball too near her face, or having her hands in the wrong position, she made a conscious effort to alter her hand position. It hasn\u2019t stopped all the blood: in extra time against Sweden, a collision left her with absorbent tissue up her right nostril.<\/p>\n Hampton might be compensating in other ways, too. Setting aside the notes she had taped to her arm before the shootout with Spain \u2013 evidence she had done her homework \u2013 Hampton might be finely attuned to the subtle cues penalty takers reveal. And given the fraction of a second a goalie has to respond once the ball is kicked, these might be more important than depth perception.<\/p>\n In his book, The Penalty Kick: the Psychology of Success, Prof Daniel Memmert at the German Sport University in Cologne dissects the science of the art. Body movement is particularly revealing, he says. When a right-footed striker aims for the left corner, the supporting leg, hip and upper body all start to rotate to the left. If the goalie is looking, \u201cthey can anticipate the direction of the penalty\u201d, he says. \u201cIt\u2019s extremely difficult not to move the limbs like this if you are going for the left corner, and good goalies have this picture.\u201d Often, such cues are picked up subconsciously, he adds.<\/p>\n And then there are the tricks goalies can play. When goalies make themselves big \u2013 throwing their arms out in a Y-shape \u2013 strikers tend to shoot closer to the goalie. But it\u2019s not the only tactic. \u201cOne of the most important factors is that you make the striker feel that one of the corners has a little more space,\u201d says Memmert.<\/p>\n If the goalie stands slightly off centre \u2013 no more than 10cm left or right \u2013 a penalty taker who is still making up their mind will often shoot to the side with slightly more room. Even if they cannot perceive the extra space. If a goalie knows a striker favours one side, making a little more room can nudge them more in that direction, giving the goalie an advantage. \u201cIt\u2019s the best trick a goalie can do because the striker will never know if the goalie is standing exactly in the middle or not,\u201d says Memmert.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hannah Hampton had already saved one penalty in the shootout against Spain at Euro 2025 when Aitana Bonmat\u00ed, the back-to-back winner of the women\u2019s Ballon d\u2019Or, placed the ball on the spot and stepped back, taking a moment before the strike. Bonmat\u00ed thumped the ball hard and left, but Hampton was there, arms outstretched, to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12789,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[3149,5521,311,1904,2930,6444,6443,6197,4749,516,1670,188,1214],"class_list":{"0":"post-12788","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-condition","9":"tag-defies","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-euro","12":"tag-eye","13":"tag-hampton","14":"tag-hannah","15":"tag-hero","16":"tag-penalty","17":"tag-science","18":"tag-strategy","19":"tag-study","20":"tag-womens"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12788\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}