Andrea Pirlo is usually the coolest man on any football pitch that he happens to be on. So his choice as Italy’s first penalty-taker in a World Cup final appears entirely logical, as footage of him calmly walking up to the ball appears to demonstrate.
But internally, his thoughts were “all over the place; drunken ideas at the wheel of fairground dodgems,” according to the former midfielder.
“The two teams gather in the centre circle and the next player up has to make his way from there to the penalty spot,” says Pirlo in his book, I Think Therefore I Play. “It’s an experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone. It’s barely 50 metres, but it’s a truly terrible journey, right through the heart of your fear.”
The journey that Pirlo describes inspires the title of The Long Walk, a new FIFA+ documentary series all about penalties.
As well as charting the history of World Cup penalties – from Germany’s victory over France in the first World Cup shootout in 1982, through the agonies of Roberto Baggio at USA ’94 and Asamoah Gyan in 2010, right up to England’s long-awaited success in 2018 – the three-part series sets out to disprove a myth: that shootouts are a
