Has anyone missed a penalty on purpose?

James Dart and Benjie Goodhart
Wednesday September 5, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Get this man a fair play award. Photograph: Ross Kinnaird/Getty Images

"In the spirit of fair play, has any player in a top-level match intentionally missed a penalty - shanked, tapped, screwed, ballooned or signalled the keeper - given as the result of an egregiously bad ref decision?" asks Dave Miller.

Amazingly they have, Dave, although contrary to popular opinion, Robbie Fowler is not one of them. While playing for Liverpool against Arsenal on March 24 1997, Fowler was involved in a famous incident at Highbury; he won a penalty, appearing to tumble under the challenge of David Seaman, before pleading with the referee Gerald Ashby not to award it, claiming the keeper had not touched him. Seaman saved the penalty, Jason McAteer rammed in the rebound, and Fowler ended up winning Uefa's Fair Play award for his honesty. However, Fowler admitted he did not miss on purpose. "As a goalscorer it's part of my job to take it and I wanted to score it," he said. "I tried to score. I never missed on purpose. It just happened, it was a bad penalty."

Unlike Fowler, the midfielder Morten Wieghorst did deliberately fire a spot kick wide while captaining Denmark against Iran at a Carlsberg Cup match in 2003. Thinking he had heard the referee whistle for half-time, an Iranian defender picked up the ball inside his penalty area; unfortunately the whistle had come from the stands. "It was unfair to capitalise on that," said Wieghorst, who subsequently consulted with his coach Morten Olsen before firing wide. Although Denmark subsequently lost 1-0, Wieghorst at least picked up an Olympic Committee fair play award.

"I know of one player who missed on purpose, although he did score at least four times during the same game," writes reader Stuart Gardner. "In 1906, the French amateur team played the English amateur team (England's first amateur international) at Parc des Princes. Vivian Woodward, playing for England, intentionally missed a penalty, which was awarded after French full-back Fernand Canelle was judged to have handled the ball. Woodward believed it was inadvertent, so missed the penalty. However, the penalty miss did not effect the result: England won the game 15-0, with Woodward scoring four (according to Fifa) or eight (according to newspaper reports at the time)."