Closer inspection revealed that the shift from ABAB to ABBA had to do with the order of penalty shoot-outs, which are being altered as a trial at the European Under-17 men’s and women’s Championships which started earlier this week in Croatia and the Czech Republic respectively.

None of the group matches require the new format to be tested, but it will be interesting to see, should any matches in the knock-out stages end all square after 90 minutes, whether the new algorithm of the penalty shoot-out has the desired levelling effect.

In place of the current system of alternation, the new plan resembles tie-breaks in tennis.

As with the old system, the toss of a coin will decide which team goes first. But after Team A has taken the first penalty, Team B will then take two together. Team A will then have two consecutive penalties, and so it will go on until there is a winner. (The standard format of first-to-five will persist, with sudden death thereafter if this is insufficient to separate the teams.)

The idea behind this shift is to try and prevent the team going second from an experience that is predominantly to do with playing catch-up. UEFA’s rule-making body approved the idea of a trial after considering research which it believes proves that the team taking the first penalty tends to have an unfair advantage.

Apparently, Team A win 60 per cent of all shoot-outs.

"The hypothesis is that the player taking the second kick in the pair is under greater mental pressure," said a UEFA spokesperson.

Maybe, however, this apparent statistical phenomenon occurs simply because Team A are better than Team B. Or more experienced than Team B. There could be many reasons...

I’m going to fall back - briefly - on some anecdotal evidence at this point which flies directly in the face of the UEFA hypothesis.

During my footballing career - Google it - you’ll be wasting your time but you’ll probably find something interesting – I have only been involved in two penalty shoot-outs, which came during the quarter-final and final of an international journalists’ tournament in Amsterdam.

On both occasions we - that is, The Guardian FC - were Team B. And on both occasions we won the shoot-out.

Looking back, the order of events had nothing to do with it. It had more to do with the fact that we had some dead-eyed shots from the spot (Stevie Brine, Paul Fry, where are you now?) and a brilliant if ancient keeper (sorry Jon, but facts, like penalties, have to be faced.) QED.

But so much for anecdote. Let’s look at the hard facts of history.

The penalty shoot-out was officially adopted by football’s world governing body, FIFA, in 1970. The first example in England took place in the semi-final of the long-gone Watneys Cup, with Manchester United defeating Hull City after a sequence in which George Best scored first from the spot to put his Team A in the driving seat.

Matches in UEFA’s European Cup and Cup Winners’ Cup were also decided by shoot-out in season 1970-1971. The format seemed simple enough, but two years later it was still clearly eluding one referee, who prematurely ended a shoot-out in the first round of the European Cup with CSKA Sofia leading Panathinaikos 3-2, neglecting the small but important fact that the Greek side had only taken four of their five allotted penalties. The match was subsequently annulled and replayed, with CSKA progressing in normal time.

There are, of course, and have been alternatives to the penalty shoot-out. Previously in European ties and international matches the toss of a coin has decided not the first team to take penalties, but the winner of the match.

One of the first recorded tie-break procedures was contained in the game’s Sheffield Rules between 1862 and 1871, whereby drawn matches could be decided through totting up which team had had the greatest number of "rouges" - that is, efforts which narrowly missed the goal.

If you go along with the Pressurised Second Taker theory, however, this latest effort at separating teams in a fair and effective fashion certainly goes a long way to correcting the pressure upon Team B.

Within the current system of alternating penalties, best-of-five, there are five occasions on which, assuming the scoring flows along, players from Team B arrive at the spot having to score to stay in the game.

Under the new system being trialled, that balance tips - although Team B is still at a slight disadvantage. Again, assuming consistent scoring, three of its players will step up a goal down, whereas that scenario will only have to be faced by two of the Team A players.

So, at the end of the day, the new system still favours Team A, all things being equal (which they never are.)

Before ABAB became ABBA in the newly proposed system, there was apparently some pressure from England’s Football Association to introduce an AAAAA system in European Championship or World Cup final shoot-offs, with conversion of one of the five efforts being sufficient to take the team through.

This counter-proposal was dropped, however, when it became clear that there would be resistance from within the England camp to the idea of practising coin-tossing...