If there's one thing guaranteed to get football fans' backs up, it's pundits who can't even get the basics right. That's certainly the case with this cliche, for what every football fan knows yet pundits don't seem to have realised is that penalties can be practiced. For real. Strikers can practice scoring them and keepers can practice saving them. Hence, a penalty shootout isn't decided by mere luck like a lottery, rather the amount of time the participants have spent honing their skills. We could give commentators the benefit of the doubt and assume that they're making the shootout more exciting for TV, but that feels too lenient. In these cliche-heavy times, we must demand that facts prevail above faction.
