Liverpool FC are nearly as good as the German international team when it comes to penalty shootouts" was said by the commentator at Liverpool's FA cup game at home to Reading FC a couple of weeks ago. As it happened the game never got that far as Reading pulled off a shock victory at Anfield to knock the reds out of the cup.

So how can teams defend themselves against the robitic efficiency of the Germans and LFC, and make these shoots outs go in their favour? Well according to some scientific research it all comes down to the shape of the player as they take the penalty kick and even which way their non kicking foot is pointed.

Lets take a further look;

The mind game of football pen-taking begins when the ref points to the spot. Anticipation, strong nerve, cool head, firm resolve - all these things come into play in a highly intense drama. Will the keeper guess which way the strike goes? Will the kick fly high over the goal?

Science has now come to the aid of goal keepers with research which may help them to stay calm. It seems that in the split second before the striker hits the ball, the orientation of his or her hips indicates which way the ball will go.

The results were presented at the Asian Congress on Science and Football in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Mark Williams, head of science and football at Liverpool John Moores University, said: 'If the penalty takers hips are square on to the goalkeeper in a right footed shooter, the penalty tends to go the right hand side of the goalie. If his hips are more 'open', the kick tends to go the left.'

His study investigated saving strategies by showing goalkeepers life-sized video footage of strikers before and during penalties. He stopped the film four times: 120 milliseconds before the kick, 40 milliseconds before, at the point of impact, and 40 milliseconds after. Each time he asked the goalies to predict the correct outcome.

Semi pro's were consistently better than amateurs at guessing correctly which of four target spots in the goal the ball would hit. At 120 ms before impact, 50 per cent of the semi professionals guessed correctly. The success rate rose to 62 per cent 40 ms before, and 82 per cent at impact. At each stage, the amateurs were ten percentage points behind the semi pros.

Williams reported other visible cues included the angle of the penalty takers approach or run up to the ball and the orientation of the non kicking foot. Ian Franks and Todd Harvey at the University of British Columbia identified this latter factor as the crucial cue in a study of 138 penalties in World Cup comps from 1982 and 1994. The non kicking foot pointed to where the ball would go 80 per cent of the time.

Now, the question is will this information make it more difficult for strikers or will it introduce a new dimension to this classic mind game as strikers try to find new ways to disguise their intentions?