Town boss Mick McCarthy has revealed that his players spent time practising penalties during training on Thursday. Saturday’s Championship play-off semi-final second leg at Carrow Road will go to spotkicks if the scores remain level after extra-time with away goals not counting.
He says the quality of the kicks varied as they always do: "Some good, some bad, some evil, some horrible. The usual.
"I said to them, you’ve only got one, no pressure, it could be worth 130 million quid if you fancy taking one!
"Me and TC were talking about it and you might have a technique for taking a penalty but when you’ve played 120 minutes and you’re knackered and the keeper’s suddenly looking twice as big as he was and the goal’s looking smaller than it was and the penalty spot seems about 30 yards away, that technique might go.
"So have something to fall back on, whether you put your head over it and hit it and hit the target and make him save it or otherwise.
"It’s only the top penalty takers that don’t have those anxieties, and they probably have them as well when they’re walking up, but not as many as the ordinary fella who never gets one to take.”
While the Blues outfielders will be honing their prowess from 12 yards, the Town keepers will be working with their coach Malcolm Webster and analyst Jordan Miles on the opposition’s penalty takers.
"Jordan will have all the penalties that they’ve taken and he’ll go through them with Malcolm and Bart and Gerks, of course because that could be the case at the time, and will show them where they put them.
"But I don’t know how many penalty takers they’ve had off the top of my head. If you think about us, Didz has taken them, Murph has taken them and that’s it.
"That tells you that when the other fellas are walking up they’ve never taken one and there’s that huge crowd making all that noise and the prize at stake, it’s a pretty nervy occasion for them.”
Perhaps significantly, Bartosz Bialkowski registered a notable shoot-out success against the Canaries when a Southampton player. The Pole saved three spotkicks as the Saints won 6-5 in a Johnstone's Paint Trophy southern area semi-final at St Mary's in the 2009/10 season, following a 2-2 draw.
Town don’t have the best record in shoot-outs, winning just two of their 10 in all competitions (2-1 at home to Luton in the Zenith Data Systems Cup in 1991 and 4-2 at Shrewsbury in August 2009, the most recent Town game to go to penalties).
Norwich have a better record, winning five of their nine in all competitions, although they lost their only play-off final 4-2 in a shoot-out to Birmingham at the Millennium Stadium in 2001/02.