[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]G[/su_dropcap]oal kicking is the cruelest part of this game bar none. Sure, you’re a thousand times more likely to get hurt physically at the ruck or in the tackle but when it comes to the kind of soul pain that can last long after the match is over, nothing touches the zero-sum game of goal kicking.

Make the kick and you’re a hero. Miss the kick and you’re anything from a player who isn’t up to the size of the moment in front of them to being a player with an inherent character flaw that will prevent them from ever being anything worth a damn in this sport.

In Ireland, goal kicking is inherently tied to the #10 shirt which, when you consider the pressure already on their shoulders with regards to game management and execution, elevates the importance of the player in that jersey to something totemic. Johnny Sexton and Ronan O’Gara – the two modern giants of the professional era – were defined by their work off the tee in a lot of ways and never more so than when they were directly competing with each other. You remember Johnny-Cam and ROG-Cam – if one of the two players missed a kick at goal, the camera would immediately cut to the other player in the stands, as if they’d be doing anything other than staring grimly at the field, like every other player on the bench after the team they play for misses a penalty. I always wondered what the director expected to see when he cut to the other #10 in the stands. Johnny pushes one off to the left and they cut to O’Gara first pumping on the bench?

The root of those juxtaposed camera shots I like to write a fair bit about the deeper tactical concepts of the game but the one nagging part of all that complicated stuff is that if the kicky fella can’t put the egg ball between the goalposts when he needs to, there’s not all that much can be done about it. I mean, the only way to score back at the foundation of the game in the 1840s was by kicking the ball between the posts and to earn that opportunity, you had to touch the ball down between the posts – essentially you earned a “try at goal”.

The game has moved on since then and incentivised the scoring of tries by increasing the number of points on offer over the decades but the importance of having someone who can make the big kicks in the big moments has never left the game and never will.

Look at Saturday’s game, for example. Ben Healy’s monster kick to win the game was the obvious highlight on a day where Munster overhauled a 14 point deficit in 15 minutes by scoring 17 points but the five other points that Healy landed were just as important, if not more so.

If Ben Healy doesn’t nail his kicks in the 69th, 72nd and 77th minute and everything else stayed the same, Munster would have needed to find a try straight from the restart with the clock ticking into the red to even have a chance of tieing the game.

Earlier in the game, JJ Hanrahan had a chance to pull the game back to 12-10 right before halftime but his kick pulled to the left of the posts and wide.

It’s a kick I’d usually expect Hanrahan to make but he’s not had a good few weeks off the tee. Successful kicks at goal change the complexion of the game and leverage pressure onto the opposition. Healy managed to do that in this game as it ticked on towards fulltime and he’s rightly the hero. JJ Hanrahan is usually one of the most reliable kickers in PRO14 but he wasn’t able to convert his opportunities to pressure Leinster in the semi-final a few weeks ago. Those were kicks you’d expect a player of Hanrahan’s calibre to make – as he did against Racing 92 in Thomond Park last year – but the context of a semi-final against a bitter foe can do things to a player.

There’s no reason, purely on paper, why a penalty kicked in training should be any different than a penalty kick in the last minute of a Heineken Cup final with the win in the balance. The mechanics of the kick will be exactly the same. But, of course, this is nonsense because the context of the kick makes it all the more difficult. Nerves, expectation, the pressure of the moment – they all play a part in the making and missing of a kick.

One of the best goal clutch goal kickers of the professional era – Ronan O’Gara – had one of the worst goalkicking performances of his life in a Heineken Cup final against Northampton. Then 23, O’Gara missed four penalties, a few drop-goal attempts and a conversion. Among the four missed penalties was a chance in the last minute to win the Heineken Cup. His kick drifted wide and with it, Munster fell to a crushing defeat. Did O’Gara choke? Some say he did. The same player would go on to kick a crucial penalty in the Miracle Match against Gloucester three years later and six years later he’d kick the winning penalty late in a Heineken Cup final to keep Biarritz at bay.

It isn’t that missed kicks aren’t important – they can be killers – but you can’t use them to define a player. Big kicks under pressure, however, are not something that every young player can do straight out of the academy. When Ben Healy stepped up to the winning kick on Saturday, I had every expectation that he would land it because if you look at last season’s PRO14, GoalKickers.co.za rated Ben Healy as the best kicker in the competition based on the difficulty of the kicks he landed rather than the raw number of kicks he successfully landed. I saw it myself in Musgrave Park where he booted a penalty over from roughly the same spot as this past week, except on the right side of the field.

He knew he had the range, backed himself with the game on the line and landed the winner from his own half. That moment of belief has the power to be a big moment in the young man’s career but time will tell. Whatever happens, he knows as a goal kicker that he dices with glory and failure every time he walks on the field. Just be glad it’s him and not you but the real killer for proper goal kickers is that they think the exact opposite. They’d rather go to war with the zero-sum game than stand by and watch someone else do it.

Healy looks like one of those players.