Culture
Breaking down the highest-scoring penalty shootout in professional English football
Deepdale was the venue of English football’s most interminable penalty shootout on Tuesday night.
After playing out a 1-1 draw in normal time during their Carabao Cup third-round tie, Fulham and Preston North End took a record-breaking 34 penalties between them, with an astonishing 31 finding the net.
Excluding FA Cup qualifiers, this was the highest-scoring penalty shootout ever in a major English domestic competition. It surpassed the League Cup clash between Derby County and Carlisle United in 2016, which finished 14-13.
It reflects a modern trend, with all five of the highest-scoring shootouts taking place within the past 13 years. That’s perhaps indicative of the increasing attention to detail during shootouts. That was certainly the case for Fulham, according to head coach Marco Silva, although it did not pay off.
“We always prepare,” he told Fulham’s media channel. “When you play in these competitions, it is part of our routine to prepare penalties. Sometimes we repeat; not just one penalty for one player. We do it twice against the same goalkeeper. But it’s one thing to prepare in a session and another thing when it comes to a shootout decision in a competition.”
For Fulham, the shootout’s longevity surpassed a miserable night in Aldershot back in 1987, in what was then known as the Freight Rovers Cup. They were defeated 11-10 after a 1-1 draw in normal time, with 28 penalties taken. Gordon Davies, the club’s record goalscorer, took two penalties in the shootout and missed them both. For Preston, this result betters a 10-9 victory over Oldham in the 2014-15 edition of the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy.
This result was a big upset for Paul Heckingbottom’s Championship side, knocking out a side that reached the semi-finals last season. Ryan Ledson, who also scored a sublime half-volley in normal time for Preston, netted the winning spot kick after Fulham’s Timothy Castagne blazed his strike over the bar. Reiss Nelson, who was one of 11 changes for Fulham from their draw at West Ham on Saturday, scored his side’s goal in normal time.
“The standard of penalties was really good,” Heckingbottom told Preston’s YouTube channel. “When you get that deep into it, showing the commitment in the game to get to penalties, and then they are racking up 9-9, 10-10, 11-11… the more it went on, the more I wanted to win the game. To have a positive end to that is really good.”
To mark this historic occasion, and in true The Athletic style, here is the breakdown of every single penalty on a unique night at Deepdale.
No 1: Raul Jimenez. Fulham. Scores — 0-1
Jimenez gets us under way. He takes a huge run-up, about 10 yards. He side-steps to the left, before strolling up to the ball and sending goalkeeper Freddie Woodman the wrong way. That’s going to happen a few times to both goalkeepers…
No 2. Ben Whiteman. Preston. Scores — 1-1
Preston captain Whiteman gets the hosts on the board. A quicker run-up, slight hesitation and then he blasts it to the goalkeeper’s right. Steven Benda goes the right way but can’t get close.
No 3. Sasa Lukic. Fulham. Scores — 1-2
Woodman goes the right way, but Lukic’s penalty, which is hit hard and low to the goalkeeper’s right, is out of reach.
No 4. Sam Greenwood. Preston. Scores — 2-2
The shortest run-up yet. Perhaps a moment of jeopardy, prime territory for a ridiculed delivery…
Never in doubt. Hard and low to Benda’s right. The ’keeper can’t get near it. Ominous standards set so far.
No 5. Sander Berge. Fulham. Scores — 2-3
High to Woodman’s right. A second penalty that the ’keeper has gone the right way for, but he just can’t reach it.
No 6. Jeppe Okkels. Preston. Scores — 3-3
Winger Okkels opens up his body and aims for top bins. It’s close to the side netting and while not quite top corner, he finds the net. Benda goes the right way but to no avail.
No 7. Alex Iwobi. Fulham. Scores — 3-4
Iwobi’s penalty would be a decent height for a goalkeeper, but he’s done the hard part and that is sending Woodman the wrong way. He flashes the goalkeeper a little smile. We go on.
No 8. Alistair McCann. Preston. Scores — 4-4
You don’t save those. Midfielder McCann whips the ball high and well clear of Benda.
No 9. Ryan Sessegnon. Fulham. Scores — 4-5
Sessegnon keeps his eyes fixed on the ’keeper and then sends him the wrong way, but there’s a little tension.
He celebrates by walking up to Woodman and putting his finger to his lips. So far the keeper tricks aren’t working for either side.
No 10. Milutin Osmajic. Preston. Scores — 5-5
Osmajic, the Preston striker, had the least amount of touches during the game. But he made this one count. That’s 10 out of 10 for the team’s best takers. Pretty flawless all round. Now for sudden death and those who didn’t fancy it…
No 11. Timothy Castagne. Fulham. Scores — 5-6
The night was going well for Castagne at this point. He nets his spot kick, high to the ’keeper’s right, who is sent the wrong way. There’s a fist pump to the away end. Enjoy it while it lasts, Timothy.
No 12. Ryan Ledson. Preston. Scores — 6-6
Mirrors Castagne’s penalty. High and unstoppable. The goalkeeper goes the wrong way. Not even close.
No 13. Emile Smith Rowe. Fulham. Scores — 6-7
Fulham’s club-record signing takes the first penalty of the night that looked a little dicey. Woodman goes the right way and almost gets a hand to it. The pace of the penalty carries it into the net. It’s an accurate penalty, though, right in the corner.
No 14. Liam Lindsay. Preston. Scores — 7-7
So many of Preston’s penalties are aimed high. It’s admirably ballsy. Fulham ’keeper Benda seems to dive under this one. Centre-back Lindsay’s penalty is nearer the centre than the corner, but it’s unreachable for helpless Benda. Preston’s players aren’t feeling the pressure of taking second.
No 15. Issa Diop. Fulham. Scores — 7-8
Diop takes two steps and crashes it into the net. Woodman has not started his dive by the time the ball flashes past him. A true elite centre-back penalty. Gets a few gasps for the chutzpah. If Diop is scoring belters then this is not going to end any time soon.
No 16. Jordan Storey. Preston. Scores — 8-8
Storey goes high and finds the top corner. Benda goes the right way, but even if he had guessed correctly he is not saving that. Well into territory now where questions start being asked about the goalkeepers… Crack open the Carabao cans, could be a long night.
No 17. Jorge Cuenca. Fulham. SAVED — 8-8
Now this is what a centre-back’s penalty should look like. None of this top-corner nonsense. Nice and readable, Woodman dives low to his left to parry the ball away. Big fist bump celebration. Now a chance to end the shootout…
No 18. Kaine Kesler-Hayden. Preston. SAVED — 8-8
After spending the past 10 minutes or so flailing miserably around the six-yard box, both ’keepers suddenly get off the mark. This penalty is abject. Kesler-Hayden can conclude proceedings, but his spot kick is far too straight and central.
No 19. Martial Godo. Fulham. Scores — 8-9
And… normal service resumes. Woodman dives the wrong way. Youngster Godo, 19, is clearly unhappy with Woodman, as like Sessegnon, he goes over to him and ‘shushes’ him.
No 20. Andrew Hughes. Preston. Scores — 9-9
Everyone wants this one scored. Centre-back Hughes again sends Benda the wrong way and ensures we will see both ’keepers take a kick.
No 21. Steven Benda. Fulham. Scores — 9-10
Benda pulls off an outrageous penalty. He sticks it in the top corner. On this basis, he might be better at taking them than saving them! Woodman next…
No 22. Freddie Woodman. Preston. Scores — 10-10
The same applies to Woodman. Benda goes the wrong way. Woodman fires hard and low. The show rolls on and the first-choice takers return…
No 23. Raul Jimenez. Fulham. Scores — 10-11
Taking two penalties in the same game is laced with risk. Although clearly not at Deepdale. Jimenez changes his run-up, adding a second stutter. He also sticks the ball in the top corner, above the reaches of Woodman, who did guess the right way.
No 24. Ben Whiteman. Preston. Scores — 11-11
Once the ’keepers have taken a penalty, it’s not that much fun anymore really. Benda goes close here, he gets his leg to the kick, which is fired down the middle. He thought the penalty would match the standards set earlier in the shootout. Good mind games from Whiteman.
No 25. Sasa Lukic. Fulham. Scores — 11-12
Lukic fires his penalty in the same direction and Woodman remembers that well. Shame Lukic has stuffed the ball into the top corner, though. We go on.
No 26. Sam Greenwood. Preston. Scores — 12-12
Greenwood’s well-struck penalty beats Benda at full stretch. Heckingbottom and his staff are chuckling on the touchline. Parents with bedtimes to keep in the stands are not amused. Neither are the couple hundred Fulham fans who have 190 miles to travel once this firing practice concludes.
No 27. Sander Berge. Fulham. Scores — 12-13
Berge shapes up to smack it Diop-style but then just strokes the ball into the net. Not in the corner, but it doesn’t matter as Woodman has gone the wrong way and he slumps to the turf. Surely we’re into bruising territory for the goalkeepers now. Good thing we’re not playing on Astro.
No 28. Jeppe Okkels. Preston. Scores — 13-13
Okkels’ razor–sharp penalty keeps us going. Sorry.
No 29. Alex Iwobi. Fulham. Scores — 13-14
Iwobi’s uncle, Jay-Jay Okocha, once had a penalty saved at the 1996 Olympics by Brazilian legend Dida. Iwobi doesn’t miss. We go on.
No 30. Alistair McCann. Preston. Scores — 14-14
At this point, there needs to be a handicap. Maybe each penalty has to be taken a yard further back? At the moment it feels a bit pointless having a goalkeeper. They are not getting near these kicks. Crossbar challenge, anyone?
No 31. Ryan Sessegnon. Fulham. Scores — 14-15
How’s your luck? Sessegnon tried to shush Woodman earlier, but the Preston goalkeeper does him a favour here. The ball hits the post, hits the back of Woodman and then goes in. Does that mean two goals for the ’keepers? Is this an own goal? If so, that means more goals scored by ’keepers than saves made…
No 32. Milutin Osmajic. Preston. Scores — 15-15
I always liked those old-school MLS penalties, dribbling from the halfway line. Maybe bring in a defender, too, and get a one-on-one scenario going. Anyway, all of the first-choice takers have taken two penalties and scored them. It is impressive from Preston, really, as they have taken and scored 11 penalties where a miss would have eliminated them.
No 33. Timothy Castagne. Fulham. MISS — 15-15
Finally. After 33 penalties, we have one that misses the target completely. Castagne gets it all wrong, it’s high and wide. Completely out of keeping with the standard of penalties in this shootout.
Obviously, this shootout was not going to be decided by a ’keeper save.
No 34. Ryan Ledson. Preston. Scores — 16-15
It’s over. Preston’s goalscorer in normal time seals the deal. Fittingly, he sends Benda the wrong way. A shootout of impressive quality comes to an end.
(Top photo: Getty Images)
A famous poet once observed that it is difficult to get the news from poems. The weather is a different story. April showers, summer sunshine and — maybe especially — the chill of winter provide an endless supply of moods and metaphors. Poets like to practice a double meteorology, looking out at the water and up at the sky for evidence of interior conditions of feeling.
The inner and outer forecasts don’t always match up. This short poem by Louise Glück starts out cold and stays that way for most of its 11 lines.
And then it bursts into flame.
“Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” comes from Glück’s debut collection, “Firstborn,” which was published in 1968. She wrote the poems in it between the ages of 18 and 23, but they bear many of the hallmarks of her mature style, including an approach to personal matters — sex, love, illness, family life — that is at once uncompromising and elusive. She doesn’t flinch. She also doesn’t explain.
Here, for example, Glück assembles fragments of experience that imply — but also obscure — a larger narrative. It’s almost as if a short story, or even a novel, had been smashed like a glass Christmas ornament, leaving the reader to infer the sphere from the shards.
We know there was a couple with a flat tire, and that a year later at least one of them still has feelings for the other. It’s hard not to wonder if they’re still together, or where they were going with those Christmas presents.
To some extent, those questions can be addressed with the help of biographical clues. The version of “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” that appeared in The Atlantic in 1967 was dedicated to Charles Hertz, a Columbia University graduate student who was Glück’s first husband. They divorced a few years later. Glück, who died in 2023, was never shy about putting her life into her work.
But the poem we are reading now is not just the record of a passion that has long since cooled. More than 50 years after “Firstborn,” on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, Glück celebrated the “intimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine” relations between poets and their readers. Recalling her childhood discovery of William Blake and Emily Dickinson, she declared her lifelong ardor for “poems to which the listener or reader makes an essential contribution, as recipient of a confidence or an outcry, sometimes as co-conspirator.”
That’s the kind of poem she wrote.
“Confidence” can have two meanings, both of which apply to “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson.” Reading it, you are privy to a secret, something meant for your ears only. You are also in the presence of an assertive, self-possessed voice.
Where there is power, there’s also risk. To give voice to desire — to whisper or cry “I want you” — is to issue a challenge and admit vulnerability. It’s a declaration of conquest and a promise of surrender.
What happens next? That’s up to you.
Cold weather can serve as a plot point or emphasize the mood of a scene, and this week’s literary geography quiz highlights the locations of recent novels that work winter conditions right into the story. Even if you aren’t familiar with the book, the questions offer an additional hint about the setting. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
When a writer is praised for having a sense of place, it usually means one specific place — a postage stamp of familiar ground rendered in loving, knowing detail. But Kiran Desai, in her latest novel, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” has a sense of places.
This 670-page book, about the star-crossed lovers of the title and several dozen of their friends, relatives, exes and servants (there’s a chart in the front to help you keep track), does anything but stay put. If “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” were an old-fashioned steamer trunk, it would be papered with shipping labels: from Allahabad (now known as Prayagraj), Goa and Delhi; from Queens, Kansas and Vermont; from Mexico City and, perhaps most delightfully, from Venice.
There, in Marco Polo’s hometown, the titular travelers alight for two chapters, enduring one of several crises in their passionate, complicated, on-again, off-again relationship. One of Venice’s nicknames is La Serenissima — “the most serene” — but in Desai’s hands it’s the opposite: a gloriously hectic backdrop for Sonia and Sunny’s romantic confusion.
Their first impressions fill a nearly page-long paragraph. Here’s how it begins.
Sonia is a (struggling) fiction writer. Sunny is a (struggling) journalist. It’s notable that, of the two of them, it is she who is better able to perceive the immediate reality of things, while he tends to read facts through screens of theory and ideology, finding sociological meaning in everyday occurrences. He isn’t exactly wrong, and Desai is hardly oblivious to the larger narratives that shape the fates of Sunny, Sonia and their families — including the economic and political changes affecting young Indians of their generation.
But “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” is about more than that. It’s a defense of the very idea of more, and thus a rebuke to the austerity that defines so much recent literary fiction. Many of Desai’s peers favor careful, restricted third-person narration, or else a measured, low-affect “I.” The bookstores are full of skinny novels about the emotional and psychological thinness of contemporary life. This book is an antidote: thick, sloppy, fleshy, all over the place.
It also takes exception to the postmodern dogma that we only know reality through representations of it, through pre-existing concepts of the kind to which intellectuals like Sunny are attached. The point of fiction is to assert that the world is true, and to remind us that it is vast, strange and astonishing.
See the full list of the 10 Best Books of 2025 here.
Active saves leader Jansen joining Tigers on 1-year deal (sources)
First Alert Weather Saturday morning forecast 12-13-25
Participants share their experience as BMW Dallas Marathon weekend begins.
Woman found dead on roadway in SW Miami-Dade
Boston city councilor pushes for state audit of federal grant funds after misuse by city program
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Video: ‘It Didn’t Have to Happen This Way:’ U.Va. Faculty Call for Review of Police Response to Protests
Inside Minnesota’s $1B fraud: fake offices, phony firms and a scandal hiding in plain sight
Residents emerge in DR Congo’s tense Uvira after M23 rebel takeover
What to know about Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s release from immigration custody
Republican House leader signals plan to begin contempt proceedings against Bill and Hillary Clinton
Three years on, former MEP Kaili remains in limbo still awaiting trial
-
Alaska1 week agoHowling Mat-Su winds leave thousands without power
-
Texas1 week agoTexas Tech football vs BYU live updates, start time, TV channel for Big 12 title
-
Ohio1 week agoWho do the Ohio State Buckeyes hire as the next offensive coordinator?
-
Washington4 days agoLIVE UPDATES: Mudslide, road closures across Western Washington
-
Iowa6 days agoMatt Campbell reportedly bringing longtime Iowa State staffer to Penn State as 1st hire
-
Miami, FL7 days agoUrban Meyer, Brady Quinn get in heated exchange during Alabama, Notre Dame, Miami CFP discussion
-
Cleveland, OH6 days agoMan shot, killed at downtown Cleveland nightclub: EMS
-
World6 days ago
Chiefs’ offensive line woes deepen as Wanya Morris exits with knee injury against Texans
