Culture
Comedic misses, brilliant 'keeping and 24 minutes of pure drama – the 34-kick penalty shootout
Maybe we should have known right from the start that this was going to take a while.
Panathinaikos’ Argentinian midfielder Daniel Mancini stepped up to take the first penalty of their shootout against Ajax, the Greek side having scored a late equaliser to force the Europa League qualifying tie on Thursday night to go to spot kicks.
But while he did technically ‘take’ the penalty, he might as well have just blown on the ball for all the force he put behind it when he kicked the thing. A pathetic penalty that 40-year-old goalkeeper Remko Pasveer saved easily was the most appropriate way to start a shootout that featured slapstick, rank incompetence and occasional bursts of excellence.
In total, there were 34 penalties. That, we probably don’t need to tell you, is a UEFA competition record. In all, 25 were scored, two missed the target entirely and seven were saved — five by Pasveer and two by Panathinaikos goalkeeper Bartlomiej Dragowski.
Ajax, who went second in the shootout, had five ‘match points’ — penalties would have won the tie — and flubbed the first four before emerging victorious.
Striker Brian Brobbey was brought off the Ajax bench during extra time, perhaps not explicitly to take a penalty (there were 10 minutes remaining when he came on) but certainly with a shootout in mind. He was one of the 12 players who had to take two penalties. He missed them both. What’s more, both of them were potential clinchers.
Missing one penalty in a shootout will bring deep shame and embarrassment, but you’ll get over it. Missing two is the sort of thing that could haunt you for years. Missing two potential winners… well, at least his side won in the end.
After that first (terrible) penalty from Mancini, the next eight were very smartly taken by, among others, Steven Bergwijn, Kenneth Taylor (both Ajax) and former Leicester City winger Tete (for Panathinaikos).
Then it started to get weird. Brobbey stepped up, and there seemed to be an expectation that he would make short work of this: he isn’t a regular penalty taker, but had only missed one in his senior career and had a prolific conversion rate as an academy player. The home crowd chanted his name, he puffed out his cheeks, hit it with reasonable power to the ‘keeper’s right… and Dragowski saved it. The air left the stadium like it had suddenly become a spaceship’s airlock.
Is it possible to ‘morally’ miss a penalty that you actually score? If so, that’s what the Greek side’s next taker, Dutch midfielder Tonny Vilhena, did. He is a Feyenoord youth product and spent eight seasons in their first team… which is another way of saying the Ajax crowd hated him.
He struck a low kick to Pasveer’s right, and the goalkeeper got down well to get more than a hand (an arm, perhaps?) to it…
… but the ball squirted from underneath him, briefly looked like it might stay out — to the point that the Ajax fans started to celebrate — but eventually span across the goalmouth and trickled into the opposite corner.
Vilhena, having heard the thoughts of the home crowd, decided to give a bit back by shushing the terraces. Would this come back to haunt him later on in the shootout? Surely not.
Next up for Ajax was Jordan Henderson, perhaps as much to remind everyone that he still plays for them. Henderson and penalties are not especially good friends: it’s easy to forget because England won, but he missed in their shootout victory at the 2018 World Cup against Colombia, and has since only taken one competitive penalty in regular time for club or country… which he also missed for England in a pre-Euro 2020 friendly against Romania. Happily, he didn’t have any problems here, side-footing straight down 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: Nemanja Maksimovic erred for Panathinaikos, saved brilliantly by Pasveer. But again Ajax couldn’t take their chance, with Bertrand Traore skewing his effort both high and wide, which is quite difficult to do from 12 yards. It was after this penalty that a squabble broke out in the centre circle, both teams getting tetchy at 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, who bagged his third save. At this stage, he and opposite number Dragowski hugged and started laughing: yes, it was getting quite silly now. And it got even sillier when Ajax passed up yet another chance to win it, as Dragowski saved from Ajax defender Youri Baas.
This was the penalty shootout that nobody seemed especially keen to win. On the touchline, the look on the face of Ajax coach Francesco Farioli suggested he was watching himself undergo open heart surgery. His opposite number, Diego Alonso, looked similar.
However, the next 14 penalties were all excellent, with the goalkeepers barely having a chance. They took kicks themselves and scored with minimum fuss, only ramping up the tension. After all, 14 penalties is a full normal shootout and a half. The Panathinaikos substitutes and coaches, arms locked on the touchline, were told off for encroaching onto the pitch. At some point, Farioli retreated from the touchline and sat alone on the bench, his aorta pulsing about two feet in front of him.
But then, another chance to win it for Ajax: Panathinaikos centre-back Filip Mladenovic tried to go for power, but it was too close to Pasveer who saved to his left.
Redemption presented itself. Just as he had earlier in the shootout, Brobbey strode forwards knowing that if he scored, Ajax would be through. He stepped up, puffed out those cheeks again, resolved not to make the same mistake again — this time, he wasn’t going to let Dragowski get anywhere near it.
And he didn’t — the trouble was that the only people who did get anywhere near it were in the back rows of the Johan Cruyff Arena. Brobbey launched an absolute Chris Waddle of a penalty high into the stands…
… and then proceeded to crumble to the turf…
… face down, unable to believe what he had just done…
… providing 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 shushed the Ajax fans after (just about) scoring his first penalty, which you can understand: he was getting abuse, he scored, and his work was done for the night because there’s no way he would have to take another penalty, right?
Ah. Alas for him, he was facing the extraordinary Pasveer again. The 40-year-old isn’t Ajax’s first-choice goalkeeper, but he took his chance to make an impression here: Vilhena tried 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 game, also saying that he was laughing with former Ajax midfielder Wesley Sneijder, on the touchline working for Dutch TV, during the shootout. “I save a penalty now and then, but I don’t think you often experience something as crazy as this.”
Pasveer last saved a regulation-time competitive penalty in 2021, in the Eredivisie while playing for Vitesse against Heerenveen. The last shootout he was involved in was again for Vitesse, against AVV Swift in the KNVB Cup (Dutch Cup) in 2017. He didn’t save any that night.
Ajax goalkeeper Pasveer celebrates during the shootout (Nikos Oikonomou/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“Remko asked why there was never a picture of a goalkeeper who has kept a clean sheet,” Farioli told AFP, referencing the many photos of Ajax greats that adorn the stadium’s walls. “I told him he should maybe play a bit better. But now I think we should quickly hang up a picture of him.”
Once more, Ajax had one kick to win it. This time they did something interesting: whereas the other players who had taken a second penalty had done so in the same order as the first round, Ajax mixed things up by sending winger Anton Gaaei up for their 17th penalty, in place 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 to Gaaei’s winner hitting the back of the net, 24 minutes and two seconds had elapsed. Ajax won 13-12 and progressed to the play-off round. If they beat Polish side Jagiellonia Bialystok they will qualify for the Europa League league phase.
This wasn’t the longest penalty shootout of all time. That title still belongs to SC Dimona and Shimshon Tel Aviv, who took 56 penalties in the Israeli third-tier play-off semi-final earlier this year.
But from Pasveer’s saves to Brobbey’s brace of misses and Farioli’s utter despair, there was more than enough drama to go around here.
Ajax face NAC Breda in their second Eredivisie game of the season this weekend. You suspect a nice, quiet, boring 1-0 win will do them nicely.
(Top photo: Nikos Oikonomou/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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