When identifying players best suited to taking a penalty, you would probably think of ability, technique and ball striking as key physical attributes.That would also probably lead you to select strikers, forwards, wingers, attacking midfielders and central midfielders first and foremost.Why, then, during a World Cup getting a reputation for bad penalty taking, have 18 per cent of all penalties been taken by centre-backs?More than half of those have been missed, with missed being the operative word. Five big centre-backs — Davinson Sanchez (Colombia), Manuel Akanji (Switzerland), Harry Souttar, Lucas Herrington (both Australia) and Jonathan Tah (Germany) — have stepped up and smashed their penalties either against the crossbar or over it.Centre-backs have scored with just 45 per cent of their penalties at this World Cup. Compare that to other positions and they don’t fare well:Defenders don’t have to be bad at penalties. Far from it: Dutch defender Ronald Koeman was one of the most prolific penalty-takers of all time, scoring more than 100 during his career.Harry Maguire’s monster penalty in the Euro 2020 final for England against Italy was crunched into the top corner in the kind of utterly uncompromising fashion you would expect from someone whose dressing room nickname is 'Slabhead'.David Luiz’s penalty for Chelsea against Bayern Munich in the 2012 Champions League final was equally as unyielding: a fast, long run-up, then full pelt into the top corner.However, in this particular World Cup, powerful penalties from centre-backs have mostly gone wrong — and this is not a new trend.“Overall, in major tournament penalty shootouts, defenders (central defenders and full backs) constitute about 30 per cent of the players featured in a shootout, and they score about six per cent fewer goals than midfielders and forwards,” says Geir Jordet, The Athletic's penalty expert for the World Cup.“Defenders still score less than players in other positions and coaches need to strongly consider whether defenders are the right players to pick in shoot-outs. I suspect they score less because their goal scoring skill levels are inferior to those of their teammates.