I came close to throwing things at the telly and it was all Liam Brady's fault.

Proceedings at Anfield were about to go to penalties. RTE cut back to the studio for a couple of minutes. John Giles said he wasn't sure how the penalties would unfold.

Eamon Dunphy was adamant that Liverpool, who'd brought Robbie Fowler on near the end of extra-time to give themselves another penalty taker, would win (and could be heard offering 2-1 about Chelsea as the coverage returned to Anfield). Liam Brady wouldn't give an opinion either way because penalties are, he said, "a lottery". It was at that precise moment that I began to fumble around for throwable objects.

Nothing personal against my esteemed colleague, obviously. I was there the night in the Heysel Stadium that Brady stuck away the injury-time penalty that started the ball rolling under Jack Charlton. I stood in the West Stand at Lansdowne Road and joined in the ovation the evening Charlton all but ended his international career against West Germany. I've ghostwritten his column. I can understand how he might still bear some well-hidden scar tissue from Arsenal's 1980 Cup Winners Cup final shootout against Valencia. But oh, Liam, how could you have said that penalties are "a lottery" when everything we've seen at major tournaments over the past 25 years has shown us that they're anything but?

Against Chelsea, Liverpool had Gerrard, Alonso, Kuyt and, in Pepe Reina, a goalkeeper with a phenomenal penalty-saving record. In the event, the shootout proved anything but a lottery. It was won by the team that logic (and Dunphy) said would win it.

And they didn't even need Fowler.

It's the sheer lazy-mindedness, the lack of intellectual rigour, of the penalties-are-a-lottery camp that irritates the most. Naturally this movement's headquarters are located in England.

For England never bow out of the World Cup or European Championships because they're beaten by a better team.

Oh no. There's always some other reason, something beyond their control.

An inbuilt get-out clause, such as the Hand of God, or Ronaldo cheating to get Wayne Rooney sent off, or . . . the perennial favourite . . . those pesky penalties. It's so much easier and a good deal more comforting to ascribe failure to uncontrollable outside circumstances or the wrath of the gods than to look in the mirror and concede that Frank Lampard and the other supernovas of the Premiership might, heaven forbid, actually not be good enough when transplanted to a higher galaxy.

A few years back, Channel 4 broadcast a documentary on penalty shootouts. (If memory serves correctly, a university study had suggested that the optimum approach was to have your five best penalty takers take them in reverse order . . . ie your fifth-best taker would take the first, your fourth-best the second and so on until the fifth and presumably most pressure-laden penalty was taken by your best man. ) Asked to comment on the findings of the study, Alan Shearer gave the interviewer a contemptuous look. "You can't tell me it's not a lottery, " he sniffed incredulously.

No, Alan, it's not a bloody lottery! If it were, Germany wouldn't keep winning their shootouts or England keep losing theirs. Glenn Hoddle was even more obtuse after the defeat by Argentina at the 1998 World Cup, asserting that just because Nick Faldo practised his putting every day didn't mean he was guaranteed to sink one on the 18th at Augusta.

The notion that Faldo's practice rendered such an eventuality likelier than if he didn't practise appeared lost on Hoddle.

According to a Dutch management consultant who wrote a book on the subject, "the idea of penalties being no more than a lottery is a self-fulfiling prophecy. If you fail to prepare, prepare to fail. Penalty-taking is not a chance thing". Liam Griffin or Mickey Harte or the Cork hurlers could equally have written those words.

Granted, there's an obvious stress management issue here, as Sven-Goran Eriksson, who pointed out that England had taken no end of penalties in training in Germany last summer, recently declared: "I never imagined we'd take them as badly as we did [against Portugal]. It wasn't tiredness, it was nerves. Taking a penalty for England at the World Cup is not like taking a penalty in the Premiership." Perhaps managers of the near future will try to condition players by marching them from midfield to the penalty area while blasting them with Wagner or Metallica over the PA.

In the meantime, AC Milan and Liverpool may well go to penalties again next Wednesday. If they do, Liam, please don't utter that dreaded sentence, no matter how great the temptation.

Because it simply ain't true.