Gareth Southgate couldn’t sleep when he put his head on the pillow and, unfortunately for him, he didn’t have any animals to talk to about his problem the next day.“I lay awake that night and thought, ‘What will people think of me now?’ and it was frightening,” the former England international said. “Stuart Pearce had said to me, ‘Gareth, tomorrow I’m going home to feed my horses. I’ll look at them and say, ‘We lost to Germany on penalties again’. And they’ll answer, ‘What do we care? Give us some carrots now’.”Southgate told that story to a German journalist a couple of months after England’s Euro 96 semi-final defeat at Wembley, in an interview that read like (and only Southgate knows whether this was the case or not) a form of therapy for him on the back of his penalty miss in sudden death.“Living with it,” Southgate told the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, “is extremely difficult.”‘It’ sounds like some form of illness. Or a bereavement. Instead, Southgate was talking about kicking a ball from 12 yards towards a goal and the consequences of it not ending up in the back of the net.Pearce was right that his horses didn’t care about the outcome. But the problem is that Southgate did care, and so did all his teammates and the England supporters.It was no different when Pearce’s spot kick was saved in a World Cup semi-final shootout six years earlier. Pearce was a football hard man in the days when that was genuinely a thing, but he walked back to the halfway line at Italia 90 wondering if he would ever recover from his miss, and broke down in tears on the pitch moments later.Gabriel sent his penalty over the bar (Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)Those two penalties are a long time ago now, and football isn’t the same game — watch the Vinnie Jones documentary on Netflix if you want confirmation of that, or think about VAR, all the other law changes and the gross influx of money from far and wide.But one thing that hasn’t altered in the slightest in the 30 years or so since — and never will unless someone comes up with a better solution to decide a match that’s all level after extra time — is the cruel and brutal reality of the penalty shootout. One player, maybe more, is guaranteed to end up carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders for years to come for failing to execute an individual action in a team sport. That responsibility, and the realisation of it, is absolutely crushing.“I feel I have let everybody down and this hurts me more than anything,” John Terry said after missing a penalty for Chelsea to win the Champions League final in 2008 — a shootout that Manchester United subsequently won in sudden death.