That is, the margin by which Sweden’s winning effort in the round-of-16 penalty shootout crept over the line before being bashed away by the US keeper - a calculation made by the video assistant referee.

But the point is that the team seeking to send Megan Rapinoe off at the end of her fabled career with a third consecutive World Cup winners’ medal should have got itself into such a tight spot on the first place.

It’s always easy to forecast the decline of a sporting superpower - individual or team - after the event. But there were some obvious pointers.

Most obvious, perhaps, was the United States failure to win the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, where Rapinoe scored twice to earn them a 4-3 win over Australia in the bronze medal match.

They also arrived at this World Cup minus five regular performers.

But the European champions, England, also reached this World Cup lacking several key performers because of injury, and they - albeit by a penalty shootout - find themselves in the last eight.

Above or beyond these factors, you do have to wonder what was the effect of the obvious disunity in the team regarding the playing of the national anthem before matches.

While two or three members chose to adopt the traditional hand-on-heart pose and sing along to the Star Spangled Banner, the majority of the team did not, something which roused some ire from home fans on social media.

Rapinoe, a two-time World Cup winner and Olympic gold medallist, stated in 2019 that she would "never put my hand over my heart" and "never sing the national anthem again".

The 38-year-old, an outspoken advocate for LGBT+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning) rights and gender equality was also among the first high-profile female athletes to take the knee during the anthem from 2016.

So what? Different strokes for different folks.

But while individual players rightly followed the dictates of their own conscience on the matter, you do wonder what that essential disunity did to the team’s sense of its own identity.

Such subtleties tend to show up in extremis - and nothing is more exktreme for a footballer than a World Cup penalty shoot-out. The US lost that test 5-4 and Rapinoe was one of three of their players who failed to score from the spot.

"This is like a sick joke," said a tearful Rapinoe. "For me personally, I'm just like, this is dark comedy. I missed a penalty."

Don’t get me wrong. I am not blaming one of America's most honoured players for their exit. 

But it is interesting to speculate on why and how could it be that this hugely experienced and accomplished player should fail at such a crucial point?

A quick and obvious parallel is the failure of England’s captain Harry Kane to score a second penalty against France in last year’s World Cup quarter-final that would have taken the score to 2-2. A team icon fails to deliver.

The truth is that pressure can buckle and bend psyches into all kinds of shapes, and the penalty shootout is like a testing laboratory for such activity.

There is no simple, certain method of succeeding in such circumstances.

But experience - and numerous articles, academic or otherwise - can offer several compelling stratagems.

Coincidentally, in the FA Community Shield final at Wembley yesterday, Arsenal earned a 4-1 penalty shootout victory over the team who eventually overhauled them to take the Premier League title last season, Manchester City.

What was noticeable was the amount of time each of the successful Arsenal penalty takers took after the referee had blown his whistle. Several seconds. It was surely something that had been discussed beforehand with manager Miguel Arteta.

Perhaps the most popular, and obvious advice to any penalty-taker is to decide in advance what they are going to do and not to change it.

Of course, deciding what to do and doing it are different things, and nervous tension can undermine the efforts of the finest athlete.

The psychologists agree, however, that composing yourself before turning a kick you have visualised into reality is one of the most helpful things you can do to make your penalty count.

An article entitled The Psychology of Perfect Penalties on innerdrive.co.uk subscribes to the "don’t rush" and "don’t change your mind" school.

"Footballers who take less than 200 milliseconds to respond to the referee blowing his whistle only score around 57 per cent of the time…Players who take a bit of time to ready themselves, be it only for one second, score on average over 80 per cent of the time.

"As well as not rushing, players are advised to pick a spot and commit to it. Changing your mind leads to uncertainty, stress and poor technique. Some players leave it to the last minute and wait for the keeper to dive before hitting it to the other side. However, this is a high risk strategy and is associated with a greater number of missed penalties.

"It is far better to pick a spot that you feel confident of hitting and commit to that. Penalties that are on target and high in the goal are rarely saved.”

Maybe Fabio Vieira read this advice before deciding on his strategy for the decisive penalty kick at Wembley.

The article offers further advice for penalty-takers who score, enjoining them to celebrate.

"A study of 151 penalties from recent World Cups and Euro Championships found that if a player celebrated their successful penalty, their opponent was far more likely to miss their next penalty.

"Their analysis showed that when the score was equal, 82 per cent of players who celebrated their successful penalties went on to be on the winning team.

"This is called emotional contagion, which describes how the emotions of one player can negatively affect the emotions of the next penalty taker."

There is advice too for goalkeepers - "It is calculated that goalkeepers are actually twice as likely to save a penalty if they stay in the middle of the goal rather than dive to one side or the other."

There is further discussion of the primal relationship between penalty-taker and keeper in a Washington Post article that references advice from academic sources.

It quotes Greg Wood, a sport and exercise psychologist at Manchester Metropolitan University Institute of Sport, saying: "The problem for a goalkeeper is the time involved.

"The good goalkeepers don’t guess, but they try to anticipate based on a number of cues that the penalty takers give off."

The article continues: "Eye-tracking experiments show that experienced goalkeepers use cues that the kicker gives off with their body, particularly focusing on the movement of the torso and legs, to make their prediction."

It quotes a 2018 study by Robbie Wilson, a professor of motor performance at the University of Queensland, which showed more than 700 online participants of varying levels of soccer experiencing 60 different videos of penalty kicks with varying amounts of time leading up to the kick.

"As expected, the more information the goalkeeper saw leading up to the kick, the more likely they were to predict which direction the shot would go," he claimed.

But then too much time predicting can leave insufficient time for acting…

"There is no one best strategy," says Wilson, whose other research into predator-prey interactions in the wild mirrors what takes place on the soccer field. "The best strategy for one depends on what the others do."

As for the kicker, they can try to deceive the keeper by looking one way and shooting somewhere else, or moving as if they will do one thing before doing another.

But Wilson warns, "deception has huge consequences to how hard you can kick it and the accuracy you can kick it."

Other tips for keepers include standing slightly to one side to encourage the kicker to go for the marginally larger opportunity, whether they realise it or not.

And another study by Wood and fellow researchers found that when goalkeepers wave their arms up and down the distraction caused kickers to shoot more often down the middle towards them.

The memory goes back to the 1984 European Cup final where Roma, playing in their own Olympic Stadium, failed to win a penalty shoot-out against Liverpool, whose goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar produced an unforgettable mind-game masterclass.

As Bruno Conti prepared to take his kick, Grobbelaar walked towards the goal smiling confidently at the cameras lined-up behind before biting the net as if deranged. Conti sent his spot kick over the bar.

Grobbelaar then produced a similarly discomposing performance as Francesco Graziani stepped up for his kick, wobbling his legs in mock terror. Spaghetti legs, they came to be known as.

Graziani was 31, and had earned 64 caps for his country.

He missed - and Liverpool went on to win the shootout 4–2.

So far I haven’t spotted these moves recommended in any psychological article of academic standing.