The NYT Magazine today had its year-end edition, The Year in Ideas 2008, in which ideas from the last twelve months are briefly described.  One item caught my eye, because my daughter plays goalie on her lacrosse team: "Goalkeeper Science."   Here are some key grafs:

What’s the best way to stop a penalty kick? Do nothing: just stand in the center of the goal and don’t move.

That is the surprising conclusion of “Action Bias Among Elite Soccer
Goalkeepers: The Case of Penalty Kicks,” a paper published by a team of
Israeli scientists in Journal of Economic Psychology that attracted
attention earlier this year. The academics analyzed 286 penalty kicks
and found that 94 percent of the time the goalies dived to the right or
the left — even though the chances of stopping the ball were highest
when the goalie stayed in the center.

If that’s true, why do goalies almost always dive off to one side? Because, the academics theorized, the goalies are afraid of looking as if they’re doing nothing — and then missing the ball. Diving to one side,
even if it decreases the chance of them catching the ball, makes them
appear decisive…..

Interestingly, the goalies’ behavior violates “norm theory,” which
suggests that when people are faced with a tough problem, they often
choose inaction, because a bad outcome looks worse and causes more
regret when it appears to be the product of a bad decision. Better to
do nothing and hope the problem goes away! But in soccer, this paradigm
is reversed…. 

Better to do nothing…   I couldn't let that go by without remarking upon the Taoist resonance.  Chuang Tzu in goal?