Occasionally, you just know somebody is going to miss a penalty.
It sounds ridiculous, and for every penalty shootout you'll hear someone say "He looks rattled!" seconds before that same player stuffs the ball into the top corner with ease, but there are times when you can see something coming a mile off.
That happened as Moussa Dembele stepped up to strike from the spot at the Nou Camp.
Dembele has wasted no time in becoming a hero in Glasgow as he bagged a hat-trick against Rangers last weekend, but in missing a penalty with the score at 1-0, only for Barca to push that lead out of reach at 2-0 moments later, he wasted his side's best chance at a result. You can never be overly critical of someone who misses a penalty, especially after having the balls to step up, but this penalty miss was so, so predictable.
Here's why:
The voodoo around players taking a penalty that they won.
The most tenuous reason, but there is a superstition in football that you shouldn't take a penalty if you were fouled to win it. Theirry Henry was a firm believer in this policy, as are many footballers.
Dembele won the kick and wanted it right away, but Scott Sinclair is a great penalty taker. This was just the start.
Ter Stegen acting the eejit.
Often it can result in the goalie looking like a twat, but here, Ter Stegen put himself in the left-hand side of the goal, hoping to influence Dembele to shoot to his right. It worked.
Call it reverse psychology if you like, but Ter Stegen definitely put the Celtic man off.
A painfully unfortunate wait between whisle blows.
1 minute and 10 seconds for Dembele to wait and think about what he had to do, and how important this shot was... Even more ridiculous is that he placed the ball 32 seconds before he struck it. That's a lot of time to second guess yourself.
That fucking stutter-step.
And here it is, the single most infuriating thing for a fan to see a player do, a stutter step.
So rarely do they put the keeper off that it seems baffling why anyone bothers. Keepers expect it now, all it does is make you freeze.
All of these factors combined to give Celtic fans, and neutrals watching the match everywhere, that feeling that he was going to miss. And sure enough...
It was a poor penalty in the end, and moments later it was 2-0 to Barca.
Who knows what a goal would have done for Celtic at that moment, and while it would be silly to blame him for the result, it's crazy how predictable that miss was.
