I was telling this soccer goalie about subliminal perception ...

Girls, want a to score with a scorer ? Here's a handy hint you could whisper in his ear at 2.00 in a darkened night club to keep his interest , if nothing else, up.

Sports psychologists (?) at The University of Hong Kong Institute of Human Performance, Vrije University and Liverpool John Moores University Research Institute for Sport and Exercise Sciences (in New Scientist today) report that after examining 200 video clips of penalty kicks from real matches they can boost the chance of a goalie’s save in a penalty shootout by 10%, with a cunning ploy that exploits the penalty-taker’s subliminal perception. WOW!

A goalkeeper defending a penalty shot faces long odds. With only a fraction of a second to react to a ball travelling at 100 kilometres per hour, goalies success rates are approximately about 18% of the time.

The goalie should simply move say 6/10 centimetres (3/5 inches) to one side and then dive the other way.

In testing this specious nonsense , the researchers projected an image of a goal and German goalkeeper Oliver Kahn onto a screen. Volunteers were invited to kick a football at the screen and were unable to consciously detect displacements of up to about 10 centimetres. Nevertheless, they were more likely to kick to the wide side of the goal.

...if you believe that ....

These people at THE OFFSIDE have another take on the value of this junk science - apparenly they CAN tell you how the offside rule works.