Le Tissier

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The facebook video's don't want to embed nicely for me. And there is one giant video on youtube "First Division goals 1991-1992" that is over 9 hours long, sending the time markings of Le Tissier's goals seems to only work now and then. For these you might have better luck clicking the link.

Matt Le Tissier, the Penalty Taker.

In this blog

• A shot map of 33 of Le Tissier's penalties available on youtube.
• A rating of the placement quality of these 33 penalties based on PenaltyKickStat's data analysis of thousands of penalty kicks.
• A quick summary of barcanumbers blog, which is one of the best mathematical analysis of his bare record.
• A full list of the penalties that I could find with some notes.
• A description of his tehcnique mostly in his own words.

Its quite difficult to get stats on his penalty record.  All sources seem to agree that he only missed one, but disagree on his total.

Wikipedia:

Uefa.com:

Barcanumbers blog:

So is it 47 from 48, 48 from 49 or 49 from 50?

I thought I would have a look to see if I could find out.  But since the Premier League he has only scored 25 penalties  (and dont you know thats when stats/records were invented too).  I have found 18 more on transfermarkt for the Old First Division years and some cup competitions, bringing me to 43 recorded pens.  Transfermarkt didnt include a reference to the one that he missed, but this seems well documented.  I also found another from the Full Members Cup (Zenith Data Systems Cup) semi final in 1992.  Which means I have only "found" 45 of his penalties. 

I dont doubt that there are more.  There is definitely a gap on transfermarkt for the years 1986/87, 87/88 and 88/89 for the First Division.  I have found most of his goals on youtube for these seasons though and not found a penalty among them.  My best guess is that the rest of his penalty goals are hiding in the early rounds of the Full Members Cup (he has scored a total 9 goals in this cup) and the early years of the FA Cup and League Cup competitions (he scored total 16 cup goals up to and including the 91/92 season and these results are poorly recorded).  I am missing 3, 4 or 5 penalty kicks.

Considering how difficult it was to find even a mere record of his penalty kicks on the hundreds of stats sites and result archive sites, I think I did quite well to find footage of 33 of the 45 on youtube.  I personally studied the footage to try and build up a shot map.  The footage is terrible so this is where this blog article loses any credibility.  My method was:

1. Play at 0.25 speed so it is easier to freeze frame.

2. Looking where the net ripples, if it hit the side net, or hit stansion.

3. Trying to find the frame about 2 frames before the net ripples.

4. Copying the freeze frame and fitting it into a grid.

I had stuff like this to try and decipher.  Notice how in some you can't even see the ball except for a small blur.  There is a bit of remembering where the ball was when you paused the video!  There was one video where the full goal was not in the frame.

Many of the videos were indeed clear enough so not a completely pointless exercise, definitely some accuracy to it.  In honesty getting the exact frame to measure by was the trickiest bit, and often  made a massive difference depending on the camera angle.

Anyway for what its worth I ended up with something like this.

I have used the same "bins" as PenaltyKickStat so that I can leverage on his xPG.  This will give me a measure of the quality of Le Tissier's placement of his kicks.  He has done quite well, with many landing in that bottom left hand corner. PenaltyKickStats data analysis indicates that 94% of penalties placed in this bin resulted in goals.

In all Le Tissier had an average placement quality of 83% based on this method and based on the 33 penalties I have seen footage of.  This is positive, most models value a penalty at about 0.76 to 0.80 xG.  According to PenaltyKickStat's blog, the entire database average xPG is 0.76.  

So he is good, but not quite 98% good.

Le Tissier doesn't put his record down to placement alone.  For him he describes it as clarity of thought, being able to read the goal keeper, and a calm composure to switch sides at the last minute even under pressure.  The keeper can wait him out and give him no indicators, or can fake one side or other.  So perhaps its not possible to engage this ability for every single spot kick.  Matt has performed well again though.  Of the 33 penalties on video he has sent 19 the opposite side of the keepers dive, while the keeper has dived the correct side 14 times.  At 58% its not a landslide but it seems to have given him an extra edge on the keeper.

The barcanumbers blog estimates him at about 88% conversion rate based on a Bayes model.  Barcanumbers has a confidence interval covering conversion rate from about 82.5% to 93%.  I'd be happy to go with the lower end of that.  My "bins" method placing him at 83%, clearly contains suspect accuracy.  So allowing for that and the slight edge he has on reading the keeper I'd be happy enough to agree to something close to 88% conversion rate.

It is a pointless exercise really, because is the boy who stepped up and took the pen in 1989 the same ability or experience as the man that scored his final penalty in 11 years later.  Has he not developed his technique over the years?  Its like trying to measure something that is in constant flux, but only getting a glimpse of it once every couple of months.

And of course there is more to it that placement and read.  Other factors are surely power for example that I haven't and dont think I can consider based on lack of data.

List of penalties that I know about below, click on number for link to youtube.

	Date	Match	Venue	Min	Score	After	Video bookmark	Dive	Shot	Bin	Comp
1	2000-04-01	Southampton vs Sunderland	The Dell	89	0:2	1:2	0:58/1:01	Left	Left	B6	Premier League
2	1998-08-29	Southampton vs Nottingham Forest	The Dell	89	0:2	1:2					Premier League
3	1998-03-28	Southampton vs Newcastle	The Dell	85	1:1	2:1	1:02/1:25	Left	Top Right	I2	Premier League
4	1998-03-07	Southampton vs Everton	The Dell	69	1:1	2:1			Left?		Premier League
5	1998-02-18	Southampton vs Coventry	The Dell	79	0:2	1:2	1:56/2:11	Right	Bottom Left	A9	Premier League
6	1997-11-08	Southampton vs Barnsley	The Dell	3	0:0	1:0					Premier League
7	1997-02-22	Southampton vs Sheffield Wednesday	The Dell	33	1:0	2:0	0:19/1:33	Right	Bottom Left	A10	Premier League
8	1996-11-02	Sheffield Wednesday vs Southampton	Hillsborough	50	1:0	1:1	1:22/1:29	Right	Bottom Left	A10	Premier League
9	1996-10-19	Southampton vs Sunderland	The Dell	52	1:0	2:0	0:48/1:02	Right	Bottom Left	B9	Premier League
10	1996-08-21	Leicester City vs Southampton	Filbert Street	68	2:0	2:1	3:56/1:42:00	Left	Bottom Right	H7	Premier League
11	1996-04-06	Southampton vs Blackburn	The Dell	80	0:0	1:0					Premier League
12	1995-08-19	Southampton vs Nottingham Forest	The Dell	10	0:1	1:1	0:31/2:12	Left	Bottom Right	H8	Premier League
13	1995-08-19	Southampton vs Nottingham Forest	The Dell	69	1:3	2:3	1:27/2:12	Right	Bottom Left	B10	Premier League
14	1995-03-01	Southampton vs Tottenham	The Dell	40	1:0	2:0	0:59/7:27	Right	Bottom Right	I7	FA Cup
15	1995-02-18	Tottenham vs Southampton	White Hart Lane	21	0:1	1:1					FA Cup
16	1995-02-08	Southampton vs Luton	The Dell	35	2:0	3:0	0:53/1:46	Right	Right	H5	FA Cup
17	1995-01-02	Sheffield Wednesday vs Southampton	Hillsborough	70	1:0	0:0					Premier League
18	1994-11-02	Southampton vs Norwich	The Dell	89	0:1	1:1					Premier League
19	1994-10-05	Southampton vs Huddersfield	The Dell	41	0:0	1:0					EFL Cup
20	1994-09-17	Southampton vs Nottingham Forest	The Dell	54	0:1	1:1	0:50/1:14	Right	Bottom Left	C10	Premier League
21	1994-09-12	Tottenham vs Southampton	White Hart Lane	75	1:0	1:1		Left	Bottom Left	A6	Premier League
22	1994-05-07	West Ham vs Southampton	Boleyn Ground	65	2:2	2:3	2:55/4:47	Right	Top Right	H3	Premier League
23	1994-04-16	Southampton vs Blackburn	The Dell	69	2:1	3:1	1:03/1:35	Right	Mid Left	A8	Premier League
24	1994-04-09	Norwich vs Southampton	Carrow Road	63	3:2	3:3	15:34/25:32	Right	Bottom Left	A9	Premier League
25	1994-02-14	Southampton vs Liverpool	The Dell	43	2:0	3:0	1:29/3:02	Left	Top Right	I2	Premier League
26	1994-02-14	Southampton vs Liverpool	The Dell	55	3:0	4:0	2:02/3:02	Right (Waited)	Bottom Right	I8	Premier League
27	1994-01-15	Southampton vs Coventry	The Dell	44	0:0	1:0	0:15/0:52	Left	Top Left	B7	Premier League
28	1993-03-24	Southampton vs Nottingham Forest	The Dell					Left	Left	C7	Premier League
29	1993-03-13	Southampton vs Ipswich	The Dell	65	1:2	2:2	2:04/2:32	Left	Mid Right	G5	Premier League
30	1992-10-07	Southampton vs Gillingham	The Dell		1:0	2:0	2:55/5:05	Left	Bottom Left	A10	EFL Cup
31	1992-08-29	Southampton vs Middlesbrough	The Dell	81	0:1	1:1	00:14/6:18	Right	Bottom Left	B10	Premier League
32	1992-01-29	Chelsea vs Southampton	Stamford Bridge	7	0:0	0:1	6:27:00/9:44:39	Right	Bottom Left	B10	Full Members Cup
33	1991-10-26	Nottingham Forest vs Southampton	The City Ground	71	0:1	0:2	3:45:21/9:44:39	Right	Bottom Left	A10	First Division
34	1991-09-03	Luton vs Southampton	Kenilworth Road	45	0:0	0:1	0:14/1:06	Right	Bottom Left	B10	First Division
35	1991-05-04	Derby vs Southampton	The Baseball Ground	86	5:1	5:2	1:51/2:08	Left	Top Left	A6	First Division
36	1991-04-13	Southampton vs Sunderland	The Dell	82	1:1	2:1	1:14/1:31	Right	Mid Right	I8	First Division
37	1991-03-23	Chelsea vs Southampton	Stamford Bridge	57	0:1	0:2	0:25 of 0:46	Left	Bottom Left	A10	First Division
38	1991-02-23	QPR vs Southampton	Loftus Road	65	2:0	2:1	0:50/0:58	Right	Bottom Left	A10	First Division
39	1990-11-03	Wimbledon vs Southampton	Plough Lane	80	1:0	1:1					First Division
40	1990-04-28	Southampton vs Coventry	The Dell		0:0	1:0					First Division
41	1990-03-17	Wimbledon vs Southampton	Plough Lane		0:2	0:3					First Division
42	1990-01-24	Southampton vs Oldham	The Dell		1:0	2:0	1:18/2:21	Right	Right	G6	EFL Cup
43	1989-12-30	Southampton vs Sheffield Wednesday	The Dell	44	0:1	1:1	0:26/1:01	Left	Left	A9	First Division
44	1989-11-18	Chelsea vs Southampton	Stamford Bridge	44	0:0	0:1	0:19/1:38	Right	Bottom Left	A10	First Division
45	1989-09-30	Southampton vs Wimbledon	The Dell								First Division
46
47
48
49

 (Please if you know of a penalty that I am missing, let me know @FoG-BLoG on twitter)

His Technique

He talks on youtube about hitting it to the goalkepepers left by default.  Which doesnt bear out n the clips that I have seen - with most going into the goal keepers right (22 of 33).

Further in this video he describes how he could make a split second decision to change sides.  Evidently he did this alot.

He describes the same technique almost word for word on a few different interviews.  Here he is talking to Paul Merson about it also.

Incidently he scored 3 of 3 in this above video with Merson, and again despite professing a preference for the keeper's left, two of the three went to his right.

In this next video, a "research" video (from the famous reseach institute 888sports), the keeper saves 12 of 50 - so assuming that all hit the target its a conversion rate of 76%.

Another video where he plays a fun penalty shootout vs Lambert he misses two from 5.

Certainly we won't take these last few videos over seriously but I do think it shows he wasn't a 98% player - he needed some luck to hit that rate.  Certainly he was one of the best penalty takers of all time.  

No matter who you are when you step up to take a penalty you might miss some and hit some (even the best wont generally be less than 1/8 to score).  I think that we need to remember that next time the media lambast a poor young player for missing a crucial penalty kick.  A lot of the time it will be just variance, just stupid luck, although the media and "experts" will always build in a narrative on why he missed - what he did wrong or what the manager did wrong - should have taken the last penalty, too young, shouldnt take 2 pens in the one match with the same taker, not fresh, not caught up to the pace of the game yet, too cold, keeper mind games, didnt practice enough penalty shootouts in training, bottled it, couldnt handle the pressure etc etc.