Today I'm going back 13 years to 2009 and Tottenham's second League Cup Final in successive seasons, this time against Manchester United. The game was played in front of 88,217 attendees. The programme cover in my opinion is another very poor effort from the Wembley production team.
I remember this game as being one in which Spurs played their first choice XI but Manchester United did not. It has become fashionable for the big beasts of the Premier League to field fringe players in the League Cup in order to give them minutes on the pitch whilst resting regular first choices. Certainly Sir Alex Ferguson didn't pick the likes of Edwin van der Saar, Wayne Rooney, Michael Carrick or Gary Neville on the day, even for United's bench, but when you look at the side that he did select then you have to say that it was still pretty strong, containing as it did Rio Ferdinand, Paul Scholes, Christiano Ronaldo and Carlos Tevez. United's fringe players included former Racing Club Warwick goalkeeper Ben Foster alongside John O'Shea, Patrice Evra, Jonny Evans, Darron Gibson and Nani.
Looking at the match highlights (see the video attached to my blog), this wasn't a bad game. United probably had the better of things and Spurs were fortunate not to concede a penalty when Ledley King caught Ronaldo in the penalty area but the referee saw fit to award the United number seven a rather unjust yellow card (shame). In the last minute of regulation time Ronaldo left the woodwork shuddering as his shot came back off an upright but there were to be no goals in 120 minutes of football and it all came down to penalty kicks.
Professor Palacios-Huerta of the London School of Economics has analysed over 1,300 penalty kicks from 129 shoot-outs and discovered that the team that went first won over 60% of the time. When you consider that the team going second were therefore only victorious around 40% of the time then the odds are significantly stacked in favour of the team commencing the shootout. There are several theories as to why this is the case but the most plausible is that anxiety is the main factor in a penalty shootout: there is more expectation on the player who has to follow a goal from the opposition than there is for the player who has a blank slate. Of course, in this case United went first and Spurs substitutes Jamie O'Hara and David Bentley (strangely wearing the number 5 shirt), failed to score their penalties. It was left to the Brazilian Anderson (181 appearances for United across 8 seasons) to convert United's fourth successful penalty to win the Carling Cup for United by 4-1.
CRB Match No. 1680
Comments
Post a Comment