On reflection: Like Lionel Messi, Hazard’s change in penalty technique betrays a lack of confidence

When Jose Mourinho compared Eden Hazard with Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, this was not what he had in mind. The Chelsea boss continued his wretched record in penalty shoot-outs with a fifth successive defeat on the Chelsea bench, and he watched Hazard do what Ronaldo and Messi had done before them: miss a penalty in an important game.

Granted, missing in a Capital One Cup tie is not quite as serious as when the two best players of their generation missed within 24 hours of each other in May 2012: they were playing in Champions League semi-finals and both their teams ended up losing, Barcelona to Chelsea and Real Madrid, after a shoot-out, to Bayern Munich.

While the spotlight will continue to rest on the under-pressure Portuguese, it’s worth considering the role of Hazard in the Blues’ latest ‘death by 12 yards’. Hazard has yet to score this season and this was his second penalty failure of the campaign. His first came in the Champions League tie against Maccabi Tel Aviv, continuing a bizarre trend of slipping up against European minnows in group stages: he has also failed to score against Nordsjaelland and Maribor.

If those misses were linked to complacency, that was definitely not the case at the Britannia Stadium on Tuesday night. Hazard has looked short of confidence for much of the season and while picking him to take penalty number five was no surprise (and not a mistake), a likeness to Messi, once again, was noticeable.

In his previous 39 penalties, Hazard has always used the Goalkeeper-Dependent method. This is a strategy which involves him looking at the goalkeeper during his run-up and waiting for him to move first. Then he rolls the ball in the other direction – and usually in the net. It was the strategy preferred by experts like Matt Le Tissier and Gaizka Mendieta and though technically it's a tricky penalty to perfect, over a long period of time it is a more successful method.

Yet with Hazard needing to score against Stoke to avoid defeat – a situation which automatically reduces scoring likelihood from 78 per to 72 per cent – the Belgian kept his eyes down, firmly on the ball, and picked his spot. This is the Goalkeeper-Independent method and relies on a powerful strike (which Hazard doesn't have) and the hope that the goalkeeper will go the other way. Alan Shearer and Rickie Lambert prefer this method.

Why did Hazard change? The Goalkeeper-Dependent method relies on confidence and trust in your own technique. There is something cocky and arrogant about its execution. It would seem that Hazard has lost that swagger about his game in recent weeks.

He is not alone: when Messi suffered from his own penalty crisis last season, going on a run of five misses from ten penalties and four from seven for Barcelona, it coincided with his own dip in form. Tension was high and confidence low. As a result, he changed his penalty strategy from Goalkeeper-Dependent to Goalkeeper-Independent at that time. See here for the full explanation:

This is the season that Hazard was expected to cement his position among the world’s elite players. That in itself provides an extra pressure, according to Director of Psychology at the Norwegian Centre of Football Excellence, Dr. Geir Jordet. He looked at 37 shoot-outs from World Cup, European Championship and Champions League games. There were 298 different players, taking 366 kicks. He divided the players into three categories: high-status players, no-status players, and future-status players.

By high-status, he was referring to players who have won individual recognition for their performances: either a top-three place in FIFA’s World Player of the Year awards, the Ballon D’Or vote, South America’s Footballer of the Year, the World Cup Golden Boot or a place in UEFA’s Team of the Year. 41 players, taking 67 penalties, were high-status players. No-status players were those who had not won and never did win awards; future-status were those who had not won awards when they took their penalties, but would go on to win awards in the future.

His results were surprising: overall, 74% of the penalties were scored, but the high-status players only scored with 59% of their kicks. The no-status players scored with 74% and the future-status players, with 89%. The high-status players also missed the target more often than the others: on 13% of their kicks, compared with 7% for future-status players and 5% for no-status players.

It may just be coincidence that since winning the PFA Player of the Year award, Hazard has taken two penalties and not scored from either. After all, it's a tiny sample and his penalty record of 33 goals from 40 efforts is still 82.5%, well above the average. But pressure can do strange things to a player. “High-status players have more to lose and therefore their fall will be bigger.” Jordet explained. “These individuals are likely to experience extra performance pressure.”

Who else missed on Tuesday night for their teams? Riyad Mahrez for Leicester and Wes Hoolahan and Nathan Redmond for Norwich. Okay, so those guys may not be in the Ballon D’Or running anytime soon but in the context of their own teams, they were perhaps the players most expected to score.

So, is Mourinho just unlucky when it comes to penalty shoot-outs then? I would argue that is not the case. In the past, he has listened to his players more than his own mind: against Liverpool in the 2007 Champions League semi-final, Arjen Robben persuaded him to take a penalty and missed; he asked Romelu Lukaku if he wanted to take one in the SuperCup loss to Bayern, and the Belgian then missed. It should be Mourinho making the decisions for the players, not them self-selecting.

“I have lost so many times and I did everything: the team practised, the team did not practice,” Mourinho admitted last year in an interview. “I analysed opponents for years – the percentage of where they take the penalties, percentage of where the goalkeeper goes or does not go; and I don’t do this, I do it by instinct. We did everything we could do. Nothing you can do, man, nothing.”

This time Mourinho’s latest spot-kick defeat was not about his player selection or their order. Instead it was down to Hazard’s change of technique and current dip in confidence. Different reasons. Same result.