Footballer's body betrays whether penalty kick will swerve to left or right

Washington, July 1 (ANI): A footballer's body betrays whether his penalty kick will swerve to the left or right just a split second before his foot meets the ball, according to new American research.

The findings of the study, conducted by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, could explain how some top goalies are able to head off a penalty kick, diving in the correct direction before the ball is kicked.

It could also point the way to changes in how players kick, and goalkeepers react.

The research, performed by Rensselaer doctoral student Gabriel J. Diaz, employed motion capture technology and computer analysis to identify five early indicators of the direction a ball would ultimately be kicked.

Diaz said: "When a goalkeeper is in a penalty situation, they can't wait until the ball is in the air before choosing whether to jump left or right - a well-placed penalty kick will get past them. As a consequence, you see goalkeepers jumping before the foot hits the ball. My question is: Are they making a choice better than chance (50/50), and if so, what kind of information might they be using to make their choice?"

Diaz tested 27 potential indicators of kick direction - 12 drawn from sports literature and 15 derived from a computer analysis of the kicks - and identified five as reliable indicators of the direction the ball will go.

In the second part of his work, Diaz also demonstrated that four of the five early indicators he identified are used by people who are able to predict the direction of the kick before the foot strikes the ball.

Diaz used motion capture technology - cameras, sensors, and software - in Rensselaer Associate Professor Brett Fajen's Perception and Action (PandA) motion capture lab to record the movements of three college-level penalty kickers.

More than 40 sensors placed on 19 major joints of the body (and the ball) recorded the movements of the kickers as they stood behind the ball, took two steps, and kicked either to the left or of the right side of a goal. Diaz recorded 126 kicks, half to the left and half to the right.

Then he tested the data he collected against the suite of 27 potential indicators.

Twelve of the indicators - such as the angles of the kicking foot, kicking upper-leg, and kicking shank - were movements of a specific, or "local," area of the body highlighted by coaches and sports psychologists. Among them he found that two - the angle at which the non-kicking foot is planted on the ground, and the angle of the hips as the kicking foot swings forward -are reliable indicators of kick direction.

The 15 indicators identified in a computer analysis of the kicks were so-called "distributed movements" - patterns of coordinated movement throughout the body. Three of the "distributed" movements proved to be reliable early indicators, none of which appears to have drawn previous attention in sports literature.

Emerging evidence in the study of motor control has pointed to a significant role for distributed movements, Diaz said. He described distributed movement as a combination of movements developed over many repeated attempts to perform a task, in this case kicking in a particular direction.

He said: "When, for example, you shift the angle of your planted foot, perhaps in an attempt to hide the direction of the kick, you're changing your base of support. In order to maintain stability, maybe you have to do something else like move your arm. And it just happens naturally. If this happens over and over again, over time your motor system may learn to move the arm at the same time as the foot. In this way the movement becomes one single distributed movement, rather than several sequential movements. A synergy is developed."

A distributed movement is complex, but, as Diaz's second experiment indicates, some people may be using it - however unconsciously - to inform their judgment as to which direction the ball will go.

In his second experiment, Diaz played an animation of the motion capture data to a group of 31 subjects, and asked the subjects to pick which direction they thought the ball would go. In the animation, each body joint is represented by a dot, and movement of the body is easily recognizable as such. The animation runs from the standing-start until the foot reaches the ball, at which point the screen goes black and subjects pressed a button to the left or right of the screen, indicating which direction they thought the ball had gone.

Among his 31 subjects, all of whom were novices to the activity, 15 were not able to score above chance (50/50), even when given one-half second after the scene to ponder the outcome. Sixteen, however, did perform better than chance.

Diaz then looked for relationships between successful judgments on ball direction and each of the "local" and "distributed" movements he had tracked. His analysis revealed strong correlations between the two "local" and two of the three "distributed movements" that were reliable indicators of kick direction.

Diaz said: "The question is, knowing these potential sources of reliable information, what do people actually use? I found four reliable sources that were well correlated with subjects' judgments."

Another finding, he said, is that the 16 successful subjects waited longer than the 15 unsuccessful subjects to make their choices (if the half-second elapsed without a response from the subject, no result was entered).

Diaz said: "There is a clear relationship between response timing and performance." (ANI)