Maybe we should have known from the start that this would take a while.
Panathinaikos’ Argentine midfielder Daniel Mancini took the first penalty of their shootout against Ajax after the Greek side scored a late equalizer to force Thursday night’s Europa League qualifying match to go to penalties.
But even though he technically “took” the penalty, he might as well have just blown the ball because of all the force he put behind it when he kicked the thing. A pitiful penalty that forty-year-old goalkeeper Remko Pasveer easily saved was the most appropriate way to start a shootout full of slapstick, incompetence and the occasional burst of excellence.
There were 34 penalties in total. That, we probably don’t need to tell you, is a UEFA competition record. A total of 25 were scored, two missed the target completely and seven were saved: five by Pasveer and two by Panathinaikos goalkeeper Bartlomiej Dragowski.
Ajax, who came second in the shootout, had five ‘match points’ (the draw would have been won after penalties) and dropped the first four before emerging victorious.
Striker Brian Brobbey was brought off the Ajax bench in extra time, perhaps not explicitly to take a penalty (there were still 10 minutes to go when he came on) but certainly with a shootout in mind. He was one of twelve players who had to take two penalties. He missed them both. Moreover, they were both potential game-changers.
Missing one penalty in a shootout will bring deep shame and embarrassment, but you will get over it. Missing two could haunt you for years. There are two potential winners missing… well, at least his side won in the end.
After that first (terrible) penalty from Mancini, the next eight were very cleverly taken by, among others, Steven Bergwijn, Kenneth Taylor (both Ajax) and former Leicester City winger Tete (for Panathinaikos).
Then things started to get weird. Brobbey stepped up and there seemed to be an expectation that he would make short work of this: he is not a regular penalty taker but had missed just one in his senior career and had a prolific success rate as an academy player. The home crowd chanted his name, he puffed out his cheeks, hit it with reasonable force to the goalkeeper’s right… and Dragowski saved him. The air left the stadium as if it had suddenly become the airlock of a spaceship.
Is it possible to ‘morally’ miss a penalty that you actually score? If so, then that is what the next player in the Greek team, Dutch midfielder Tonny Vilhena, did. He is a youth product of Feyenoord and played in the first team for eight seasons… which is another way of saying that the Ajax crowd hated him.
He hit a low kick to Pasveer’s right side and the goalkeeper went down well to get more than one hand (an arm perhaps?)…
…but the ball squirted out from under him, seemed to stay out for a moment – to the point that the Ajax fans started cheering – but eventually ended up over the goal mouth and seeped into the opposite corner.
Vilhena, having heard the thoughts of the home crowd, decided to give back a little by silencing the terraces. Would this come back to haunt him later in the firefight? Certainly not.
The next player for Ajax was Jordan Henderson, perhaps to remind everyone that he still plays for them. Henderson and penalties aren’t exactly good friends: it’s easy to forget that because England won, but he missed the 2018 World Cup shootout victory against Colombia, and has taken just one competitive penalty in regular time for club or country since. .. which he also missed for England in a pre-Euro 2020 friendly against Romania. Luckily he didn’t have any problems here, his feet were straight through the middle and into the net.
GO DEEPER
Jordan Henderson – the serial winner who is now just an idea for fans to hate
Then another miss followed: Nemanja Maksimovic made a mistake for Panathinaikos, brilliantly saved by Pasveer. But once again Ajax couldn’t take their chance, with Bertrand Traore skewing his effort both high and wide, which is quite difficult to do from twelve yards. It was after this penalty that an argument broke out in the center circle, with both teams becoming testy in this extended shootout, and referee Chris Kavanagh booked a player from each side.
The next penalty was Panathinaikos’ Sverrir Ingason, who went low but too close to Pasveer and grabbed his third save. At this stage he and colleague Dragowski hugged each other and started laughing: yeah, things were getting pretty weird now. And it got even crazier when Ajax missed another chance to win, when Dragowski saved from Ajax defender Youri Baas.
This was the penalty shootout that no one particularly wanted to win. On the sidelines, the look on Ajax coach Francesco Farioli’s face suggested that he saw himself undergoing open-heart surgery. His counterpart, Diego Alonso, looked similar.
However, the next fourteen penalties were all excellent, with the goalkeepers barely getting a chance. They took the kicks themselves and scored with minimal fuss, which only increased the tension. After all, 14 penalties are a completely normal shootout of one and a half penalties. Panathinaikos substitutes and coaches, clutching the touchline, were told to enter the field. At one point, Farioli withdrew from the sideline and sat alone on the bench, his aorta pulsing about two feet in front of him.
But still a chance for victory for Ajax: Panathinaikos central defender Filip Mladenovic tried to go for power, but was too close to Pasveer who saved to his left.
Redemption presented itself. Just like earlier in the shootout, Brobbey walked forward, knowing that Ajax would be ready if he scored. He took a step forward, puffed out his cheeks once more, and decided not to make the same mistake again; this time he didn’t let Dragowski near it.
And he didn’t. The problem was that the only people who came close were in the back rows of the Johan Cruyff Arena. Brobbey launched an absolute Chris Waddle from a penalty high into the stands…
…and then proceeded to crumble towards the turf…
…face down, unable to believe what he had just done…
…a classic ‘you can see the exact moment his heart breaks in two’ moment…
But wait. Here comes Vilhena. You’ll remember from earlier that the former Feyenoord man had silenced the Ajax fans after scoring (just about) his first penalty, which you can understand: he was abused, he scored and his job was done for that night, because there is no then he should take another penalty, right?
Ah. Unfortunately for him, he faced the special Pasveer again. The 40-year-old is not Ajax’s first goalkeeper, but he took his chance to impress here: Vilhena attempted the same penalty as his first, but this time Pasveer got more of his body behind it and kept it out for his fifth save.
“Five is quite a lot, yes,” he deadpanned after the match, while also saying he was laughing during the shootout with former Ajax midfielder Wesley Sneijder, who was working on the sidelines for Dutch television. “I save a penalty every now and then, but I don’t think you see something as crazy as this often.”
Pasveer last saved a competitive penalty during regular time in 2021, in the Eredivisie when he played for Vitesse against Heerenveen. The last shootout he was involved in was again for Vitesse, against AVV Swift in the KNVB Cup in 2017. He didn’t make a single save that night.
Ajax goalkeeper Pasveer celebrates during the shootout (Nikos Oikonomou/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“Remko asked why there was never a photo of a goalkeeper keeping a clean sheet,” Farioli told AFP, referring to the many photos of Ajax greats that adorn the walls of the stadium. “I told him maybe he should play a little better. But now I think we should put up a picture of him soon.’
Once again Ajax got one kick to win. This time they did something interesting: while the other players who had taken a second penalty had done so in the same order as in the first round, Ajax mixed things up by sending on winger Anton Gaaei for their seventeenth penalty, instead of Henderson . He went low into the bottom corner, Dragowski went the wrong way and finally, finally, finally it was over.
From the moment Mancini took the first penalty against Gaaei’s winner that hit the back of the net, 24 minutes and two seconds had passed. Ajax won 13-12 and advanced to the play-off round. If they beat Polish side Jagiellonia Bialystok, they will qualify for the Europa League stage.
This was not the longest penalty shootout of all time. That title still belongs to SC Dimona and Shimshon Tel Aviv, who took 56 penalties in the semi-finals of the Israeli third-tier play-offs earlier this year.
But from Pasveer’s saves to Brobbey’s series of misses and Farioli’s utter desperation, there was more than enough drama here.
Ajax will play against NAC Breda this weekend in the second Eredivisie match of the season. You suspect a nice, quiet, boring 1-0 win will do them good.
(Top photo: Nikos Oikonomou/Anadolu via Getty Images)