Jonathan Tah stepped up to take the pivotal penalty in Germany’s World Cup shootout loss to Paraguay, but it went all went awry — in fact, it went absolute chimneys. But the Bayern Munich defender has taken it all in stride.
“My general approach is to prepare myself for situations like that,” Tah relayed in an interview with Sky Germany’s Torben Hoffmann (as captured by @iMiaSanMia). “In life, you’re always going to experience difficult moments and setbacks. The real question is how you deal with them and how well you’ve prepared yourself for them.
“When I stepped up to take the penalty, I did so with complete conviction. I wanted to score, but I didn’t. What matters much more, though, is that before the tournament I made a commitment to take responsibility, to be courageous, and to be there for the team in the toughest moments. In the end, I stayed true to those values, and that’s why I can and have to live with missing the penalty. What I would find much harder to live with is feeling that I hadn’t lived up to those values or to what I had set out to do.”