Where Do Better Players Look?

You’re having a bad game and one of your teammates steps in.

They watch you throw your boule, then tell you what they think the problem is. You’re not looking properly. Pick your landing spot. Stare at it. Don’t take your eyes off it until the boule has left your hand.

You try it on the next one. It feels like effort. It doesn’t feel like playing.

That advice gets passed around every pétanque terrain I’ve played on, and it sounds right, and it has research behind it. I mentioned the quiet eye in passing last week. Two more studies landed this year, and neither of them says quite what the advice does.

Forty-eight curlers

The clearer of the two comes from Li and colleagues in China, who studied wheelchair curling: 48 athletes across 3 standards, with the top group including Paralympic and World Championship gold medallists. Everyone was tracked while delivering, and their gaze was mapped against the areas that mattered to the shot.

The elite athletes put 54.3% of their fixations and 59.8% of their viewing time on the target, and looked considerably less at areas that didn’t matter. Within each group, more time on the target went with better judged placement.

So far, nothing surprising.

Here’s the part that isn’t:

The elite athletes used fewer fixations than the novices, and spent less time fixating overall.

Not longer. Fewer.

That isn’t staring. Almost none of that time went on things that had no bearing on the delivery.

Twenty footballers

The second comes from another Chinese group, at Wuhan Sports University, who watched footballers taking penalties: ten professional or semi-professional players and ten university players, eye-tracked from the run-up to the moment the ball was struck.

Rather than counting fixations, the researchers measured how scattered each player’s gaze points were. The more experienced group’s gaze sat in tighter clusters, by a moderate margin.

Same direction as the curling, in a completely different action. That’s worth something. Two sports, two research groups, one pattern: as players get better, they appear to look at less.

What I think it means

I don’t read either of these as findings about eyes. I read them as findings about the picture, which is the thing I keep coming back to when I coach pétanque. In Week 3: Arc I wrote that the throw carries the picture you prepared. These studies are about what preparing it looks like from outside.

Stand over a shot you know well and you have already dealt with most of what’s in front of you. You’ve seen the stone near the landing spot and decided it doesn’t come into it. The short boule isn’t sitting on the line you’ve chosen. You’ve played terrain like this before, and you know what it does to a boule. There’s less left to work out, so there’s less to look at.

That is the argument I made in When Do You Stop Looking?, and these two studies are the first outside evidence I’ve found that fits it.

If that’s right, the gaze isn’t the skill. It’s what a finished picture looks like. You don’t get better by teaching your eyes to move less. You get better by having less left to decide.

That is my interpretation and not the researchers’. Neither study measured what its participants understood about what was in front of them. Both measured where the eyes went.

That leaves the popular advice in an awkward position. Both studies measured where attention lands and how widely it scatters. Neither has much to say about the duration of a single look, which is the thing the quiet eye is actually about. Vickers defined it as the length of the final fixation before the movement starts. The curling study counted fixations and totalled their time. It never reports how long that last look lasted.

So “stare at your landing spot” is asking for something neither study found. It takes the one thing the quiet eye does describe, the last look, and tries to install it as the first move.

How far can we take this?

Both of these are other people, in other sports. What I take from them is the direction, and here is how far that goes.

Both studies watched people who were already good. Neither of them taught anybody to look this way and then checked whether it helped. That is the bit that matters. Watching what good players do is not the same as finding out how to become one, and the settled gaze may well come from knowing your job rather than the other way round.

The curling study looked at three groups on one day. Its elite players were different from the novices in a hundred ways that had nothing to do with their eyes. Paralympic medallists are not novices who happen to look at things better.

The football study is smaller, and its experts had been training about four times as long as its amateurs. But here is the thing I keep going back to. Nobody wrote down whether the penalties went in. Not one of them. So it can tell you the experts’ gaze was tighter. It can’t tell you that being tighter did them any good.

Neither of them was pétanque. Both are hard in their own ways, and I would not last five minutes at either. But the ice and the penalty spot are the same for everyone who steps up to them. Our terrain isn’t, and what it does to a boule after it lands is most of our game.

What you can actually do with it

Not a pétanque drill. There isn’t one here to give you.

What there is, I think, is a better question to ask when you can’t settle. The instinct is to treat it as a concentration problem and tell yourself to focus. These studies gently suggest looking somewhere else for the cause.

If your eyes keep travelling before a throw, the useful question isn’t why can’t I concentrate? It’s what have I not decided about yet? I wrote about that in When Do You Stop Looking?, and it’s where I’d put the effort. Sort out what you haven’t decided yet and the eyes tend to look after themselves.

So watch yourself for a few sessions before you change anything. The Witness Drill is the pétanque drill built for exactly this kind of looking, and Give the Drill a Target Before You Throw is where naming the landing spot out loud starts.

Play your normal pétanque training session. You don’t need to ask it every time, and you shouldn’t. It’s the throws where your eyes keep travelling that you’re interested in, and those tend to announce themselves. When one does, ask what you haven’t decided yet.

Afterwards, write down what you noticed. A few lines is enough, and the Pétanque Performance Journal is built for exactly this kind of small, repeated note.

What you are looking for is not a number. It is the pattern. Do they cluster on the longer shots? On the ones where something of yours is already in play? On the ones that came after a miss? Each of those points somewhere different, and none of them points at your eyes.

Your teammate will still tell you to stare at your landing spot.

They mean well, and they have watched something real. They have just described what a settled player looks like from the outside, and handed it to you as an instruction.

You can’t copy the look. You can decide what you’re throwing at, and let your eyes catch up.

Research

Vickers, J. N. (1996). Visual control when aiming at a far target. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 22(2), 342-354. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.22.2.342

Li, W., Zhang, X., Zhao, C., Li, J., & Li, B. (2026). The expert’s fixation: Cognitive efficiency and attentional selectivity in wheelchair curling athletes across the expertise spectrum. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, 1739477. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1739477

Li, Z., Hu, P., Liu, H., & Dai, R. C. (2026). Outlier detection of skill decision differences of football penalty takers from a data-driven perspective: Multialgorithm modeling and empirical research of eye-tracking data. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 8, 1733178. https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2026.1733178