Euro 2024: Joe Hart on penalty shootouts, Pirlo and Lewandowski

The taker is always the favourite but as a goalkeeper you have to revel in the fact you are more than capable of upsetting them.

I actually went as far as putting myself in a false state of mind.

I would put myself in a moment when someone was taking a penalty against me – in normal play too – where I was fully convinced I knew exactly what they were thinking, what their timing would be and exactly where they would put it.

Around 85 to 90 per cent of the time I would be wrong but it meant I was in a state of mind where I was confident and comfortable with what I was doing, and it gave me the best possible chance to save it.

Even with that mindset and all the information on takers, goalkeepers are still playing against people who can pretty much do whatever they want.

The Panenka penalty that Alessandro Pirlo scored against me for Italy in our quarter-final at Euro 2012 showed that.

It gets talked about a lot, and I thought it was an exceptional penalty, a moment of quality and class.

Obviously I would have loved to have just stood there, chested it down and whacked it back at him, but he knew exactly what I was going to do.

Pirlo is a flow player, who goes with what he feels. I do not even think he would know what he had done previously from the spot.

He had just orchestrated the entire game but I had played well too and I was in a moment where I was hard to beat.

I was very confident. His favoured penalty went the way I went, and I had thought if I am going to save this, I am going to go hard.

So I did that, but Pirlo understood how pumped up I was. A beautiful player like that understands the rhythm of football and he just placed it down the middle.