Why did goalkeeper Jennifer Falk take Sweden's fifth penalty against England?

Independent

7 days ago

On the eve of Sweden's Euro 2025 quarter-final against England, in what transpired to be his final match in charge, Peter Gerhardsson was asked for an insight into how he prepares his team for penalty shoot-outs. Gerhardsson gave a long response, essentially explaining that it was impossible to pick five players to take a penalty until the moment actually arrived.
'This is one of the most difficult moments in football,' Gerhardsson said. 'Because it is so difficult to prepare for. It is difficult to have a plan. No one knows what our final 11 will look like after 120 minutes. It's one of the most unpredictable things in football.'
Gerhardsson's point was actually illustrated by England's final 11 that finished extra time: a random assortment of emergency defenders, impact forwards, and an improvised midfield of Grace Clinton, Lauren James and Beth Mead to hold it all together. This was certainly not Sarina Wiegman's plan, which had long been thrown out of the window.
As Sweden's players huddled together at the end of extra time, Gerhardsson surveyed his options and chose his takers. The Sweden squad had held a team meeting before their quarter-final and concluded that they wanted the decision taken out of their hands: Gerhardsson and his coaching staff would list the penalty takers in order, from one to 11. 'They wanted that order so we listened,' Gerhardsson later explained. 'That made it easier for us. We picked the ones we believed in.'
Within that, Gerhardsson and his coaching staff made a choice that would later define the shoot-out. There was an audible gasp in the Stadion Letzigrund as goalkeeper Jennifer Falk stepped forward to take Sweden's fifth penalty. Having saved three penalties herself, she now had the chance to send Sweden through to the semi-finals.
Standing on the line, England's Hannah Hampton did not know what to do. The England goalkeeper and Wiegman's backroom team had done their research, compiling the numbers and trends behind Sweden's strongest penalty takers, such as Fridolina Rolfo, Stina Blackstenius and Kosovare Asllani. But with those starting forwards off the pitch and out of the equation, there was no record of Falk's penalty history, in terms of taking them, to consult.
'I was more panicking that we didn't have any data on her or where she was going so I was like oh my goodness this is down to me,' Hampton said. 'I was a bit surprised but she did unbelievably well in the shoot-out herself with the amount of saves that she did. I was thinking she might just focus on saving them like I tried to do.'
With a place in the semi-finals on the line, Falk's run-up hardly suggested a confident penalty taker. It was the same technique as taking a goal-kick, and Falk's strike followed the same trajectory as it sailed over the bar.
"Peter asked if I could do it and then I said yes,' Falk later said, as reported by Expressen. 'I just thought I would take a few deep breaths and put it to the left, which I didn't do. It was f---ing c--p and then it was just about focusing on saving the next penalty."
"It's the coaches who decided that," Gerhardsson confirmed. "We have 11 players who can stand there. It's small margins, it's very hard to prepare for, it's been that way all the time. If they miss, someone else should have taken it, and if they score, it was right.'
Falk saved Grace Clinton's effort in sudden death to give Sweden another chance to reach the semi-finals, but Hampton then dived to her right to keep out Sofia Jacobson's penalty at full stretch.
After Lucy Bronze psyched out Falk by blasting down the middle - 'I watched the goalkeeper in every penalty and she dived quite early,' Bronze explained - the pressure fell onto Sweden's 18-year-old Smilla Holmberg. Another penalty sailed over the bar to send England through.
'Everyone supports her, and not only her,' said Gerhardsson, who is stepping down after the Euros. 'The sadness is not because you are 18, others are just as sad at 27 or 30. What you saw after the shoot-out was support; everyone supported one another.
'It will be difficult to deal with later, but we in the coaching team made the choice of players, and we have never been cowardly to make a decision, but sometimes things do not go your way.'