Hannah Hampton: How a goalkeeper with almost no depth perception helped England win the Euros

New York Times

12 hours ago

This is an updated version of an article published on July 15.
Hannah Hampton was not supposed to make it as a professional athlete. The doctors told her it would not be possible. That professional sport was not meant for someone like her.
In Hampton's case, 'someone like her' meant someone born with a condition called strabismus or eye misalignment, meaning one eye is turned in a direction that's different from the other. By the age of three, Hampton had undergone three operations in an attempt to correct it. None of those proved wholly successful but as she grew up, it seemed she was largely unaffected by the condition. Football seemed to come easily to the young girl who was fast on her feet and naturally used both to control the ball and, by the age of 12, she was training as a goalkeeper in Stoke City's centre of excellence.
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It came as a surprise then, when a doctor's check-up revealed she had a depth perception problem, meaning her ability to tell how far away she is from one thing compared to another is compromised. Or, as she explained when appearing on the Fozcast podcast with former England goalkeeper Ben Foster in December 2021: 'I basically have no depth perception, so I can't judge any distances.'
'How does that work as a 'keeper?' asked Foster.
'I really don't know,' replied Hampton, who saved two penalties in the European Championship shootout on Sunday as England beat Spain to retain their title. 'It just does.'
Former goalkeeper turned coach Matt Pyzdrowski believes Hampton's story is a 'remarkable' one considering the specific challenges she must face as a goalkeeper who struggles to judge distances. 'I think it would impact every single thing she does on the field,' he says, because 'everything that you're doing is judging distances. The biggest thing is being able to judge the ball and know when you're supposed to move your hand towards it and at what angle and what speed and that's before you take into account all the other players who are on the field in front of you.
'At the very top level where she's playing, the game is moving really fast and the players in front of her can do some really amazing things with the ball when they shoot. It's really a remarkable story.'
Pyzdrowski believes the fact she was born with the condition might actually be something that has helped her in learning how to work around it. He compares her situation to that of legendary England 'keeper Gordon Banks, who was Stoke City and England's No 1 when a car crash in 1972 damaged the retina in his right eye, robbing him of his binocular vision (ability to see out of two eyes). He retired from professional football the following year, although returned to action for two seasons in the North American Soccer League with the Fort Lauderdale Strikers.
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'I'd think it would be harder having had two eyes that work for your whole life and then being limited to only one,' says Pyzdrowski. 'Hannah doesn't know anything different, and she's obviously found a way to compensate. The brain and human body are so miraculous, she has probably just found her own way to read the flight of the ball, and it works.'
Hampton's recollection of her early days in goal lends credence to this view. In an interview with the i Paper in 2022, she explained how she suffered 'many, many nose bleeds' and 'a lot of broken fingers' because she was constantly putting her hands in the wrong place to catch the ball. 'I've had to adjust my set position to have my hands out to take the ball,' she explained. 'Trying to catch a ball is quite hard!'
In her day-to-day life, Hampton can sometimes feel self-conscious when she sees photographs of herself that show her eyes from a certain angle. And she has to be careful when pouring drinks: 'When pouring a glass of water, I'll miss the glass if I'm not holding it,' she said on Fozcast. 'The girls do it to me all the time at training: 'Can you make me a cup of tea?' And hold the cup, saying, 'Can I have some milk, please?'. I'll just spill it on their shoes and then they moan at me. 'Well, it's your own fault, isn't it?'.'
On the pitch, though, there is no indication that the Chelsea and England No 1 is in any way impaired. Her former club Aston Villa were not concerned about it and it was not even part of the conversation during negotiations with Chelsea.
Even taking into account Hampton's reasoning that time and experience have helped her to find a way, it is still hard to grasp exactly how she is able to overcome such a hindrance.
A conversation with sports vision specialist Dr Daniel Laby provides some fascinating insight. He explains that when strabismus occurs at a very young age (as in Hampton's case), the brain is able to effectively 'turn off' the central vision from the misaligned eye (the peripheral vision remains active). 'The medical term for it is suppression,' Laby tells The Athletic. 'The vision comes into the brain from the eye, but the brain says: 'This isn't lined up properly, I'm going to ignore it'.'
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Providing the other eye works well, this does not affect one's vision (you can still qualify for a driving licence with one working eye, for example), but it does mean you lose a specific form of depth perception; binocular stereo depth perception.
'There are two forms of depth perception,' explains Laby. 'There's stereo depth perception, which comes from both eyes, but there is also depth perception that you can appreciate with just one eye; monocular depth perception.'
To illustrate, he advises raising the index fingers on both your hands, then making one vertical and the other horizontal. Put the horizontal finger in front of the vertical one and close one eye.
'You can tell with just one eye that the horizontal finger is closer to you than the vertical finger,' says Laby. 'You do that because of something called overlap. The horizontal finger overlaps the vertical finger, therefore it must be in front of that or closer to you than the vertical finger.
'Think about a goalkeeper. If one of your defenders is closer to you than the ball where the play is happening, and their arm or leg occasionally covers up the ball, you can tell that the ball is further away than the defender; that's through overlap, which only requires one eye.'
Monocular depth perception creates what Laby calls inferred depth, or depth derived from other cues (overlap, shadow, relative size and speed, etc). Binocular stereo depth perception is actual depth due to the parallax difference between the two eye views (the fact that our two eyes see slightly different images of the same scene, and the brain combines these images to create a 3D perception).
Is one form better than the other? Laby uses the analogy of stereo depth perception being akin to high definition television. It is finer and more precise than the monocular version. Stereo depth perception only works well to a distance of six to eight feet (1.8metres to 2.4m), though. 'A perfect example of that in the extreme is when you look up at the stars in the sky at night,' says Laby. 'When you look at them with both eyes, they look like they are all the same distance from us. But we know that many of the stars are much further away than the others.'
This limitation means that when play is happening further than six to eight feet away from Hampton, her lack of stereo depth perception actually has very little impact on her ability to detect depth. She will instead depend on the monocular or one-eyed cues to depth.
'So she doesn't really lose much by not having stereo depth perception because any ball that's coming to her within two or three feet of her face, she's not going to have time to react to it,' says Laby. 'Nobody is going to react fast enough, even if they have perfect vision, because you can't make the motor action that fast to put your hand up to stop a ball that's two feet away from you and moving at those speeds.'
Doctors have told Hampton there is still an operation that can be done to straighten her eyes, but it would be for cosmetic purposes only; her vision would be unchanged. If it was successful in aligning her eyes, Hampton would then have to undergo a period of vision therapy during which a specialist would try to teach her how to stop suppressing the eye that her brain had turned off for so many years.
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To do that, Laby explains, images would be presented to the brain that are just outside of her central vision. Over time, those images would be gradually worked in towards the centre, challenging her central vision to start recognising them. 'It's using neuroplasticity to get her brain to adapt to something new,' says Laby. 'The problem is, if it doesn't perfectly line up, you're going to end up with double vision, and once you've taught someone to turn off that suppression, you can't go back and suppress again.'
He describes the chances of Hampton getting back to using both eyes together as 'very slim' and questions whether it is something worth pursuing, especially for someone who is right in the thick of a hugely positive career.
For her part, the 24-year-old is determined to use her story for good; to show others that no matter what you might be told, there is always hope.
When she first decided to speak publicly about her eye condition in 2021, a former coach questioned why she had made that decision, given the important stage she was at in her blossoming career. Hampton remained bullish. She had already achieved more than anyone expected her to, and knew there was more still to come. Her experiences could act as a positive example to others and that was enough to make her believe she had done the right thing.
'I wasn't supposed to play and I wasn't allowed to do certain jobs,' Hampton told the BBC in 2021. 'It was always my passion to do sport and it was my dream. I've always told the younger generation that if you can't follow your own dreams, what are you going to do in life? You've got to follow your dreams and, sat here right now, I can say that I've done that.'