I have seen England win a penalty shoot-out. I was at Wembley in 1996 when they beat Spain 4-2. Since then, England have lost five shoot-outs and the excuses have always been the same. "The goalie looked at me in a funny way" and "I needed to go to the toilet". I'm fed up with England losing on penalties, so I wanted to find out why they keep losing and if there were ways of improving their chances of success. I started by talking to Ricardo Pereira, the Portuguese goalkeeper who has denied England in two shoot-outs. Ricardo is a dapper man in mustard-coloured slacks and a lime-green polo shirt who likes to spend most of his time on the golf course. "I'll tell you why England lose," he says, standing over a six-foot putt. "It's because they are a bit shit and they bottle it."

1. Twelve Yards

2. by

   Ben Lyttleton

3. 
   

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The answer to England's problems may be found in an Oslo office, where Geir Jordet, a Norwegian sports psychologist, has spent 25 years studying penalties. "There are four phases of a penalty shoot-out," he observes. "The hanging around in the centre circle hoping not to catch the eye of the manager, the walk to the penalty spot, the kick, and the walk back after you've missed. They are all stressful in their own ways."

Jordet believes there are several key areas of psychological preparation on which England need to work. The first is national identity: "Many English footballers believe it is their duty to miss. If they score, the fans might think they are German." Conversely, Jordet also asserts that players must have a coping strategy in place in case they miss. "It's inevitable a player will miss at one point in his career. What's important is that he has a plan so he doesn't miss next time. It would be a good idea if this was something a little better than signing up to appear in adverts for Pizza Hut."

Penalty Icon – Matt Le Tissier. "To be honest, I never really gave it much thought. I just stepped up to the ball and whacked it."

Talking to England players, the most common refrain was: "There's no point in practising for shoot-outs. They are a one-off." This could be why the English have a much worse penalties record than every other country apart from Micronesia. And yet these same English players have a very good penalty scoring record for their clubs. Why should this be? Clearly, it was mainly because they had a secret desire to be ridiculed in the media for losing the World Cup yet again. But could there have been other influences at work? My focus switched to the goalkeeper. Could it be that English goalies were a lot worse than all the others at facing penalties? I talked to Paul Robinson. "Have you seen how hard some of the foreigners kick the ball?" he asked me. "You don't want to get in the way of that. So I always tried to guess which way they were going to kick and dive the other way."

Penalty Icon – Antonin Panenka. "It's basically a piece of piss. I got so bored smacking it in the corner, I started to chip the keeper down the middle."

Ignacios Palacios-Huerta is a statistician who has worked with Chelsea and the complete works of Honoré de Balzac to analyse every penalty ever taken. His data is remarkable. "If a player's standing leg is less that 97.63% straight," he says, "he is certain to miss. And if a player returning to the centre circle fails to raise both arms after scoring, then the next player will miss, too. But a penalty kicked at 1,633mph is certain to go in wherever you kick it." He has also made a keen study of the rituals involved in Jonny Wilkinson's place-kicking of a rugby ball. His information was passed on to the England camp and soon Chris Waddle and David Beckham had both learned to fire the ball over the bar.

Every penalty-taker has his own routines and Palacios-Huerta has compiled a 2,396-page dossier on the probability of where each footballer playing in the World Cup is likely to aim a penalty. It is a dossier that could make the difference between qualification and defeat. He offered it to Roy Hodgson. "Looks good," Roy said. "But my players forget everything I tell them the moment they get on the pitch, so there's no point in making them read it." Palacios-Huerta has now given the dossier to Holland. Ah well, there's always Russia 2018.

Digested read, digested: It's all down to this one penalty ... and England are out.