Lewis Morgan celebrates his penalty kick conversion.  (Vincent Carchietta-USA TODAY Sports)

By Michael Lewis
FrontRowSoccer.com Editor

To Lewis Morgan, taking penalty kicks is nothing more than a cat and mouse game.

Where is the shooter going to place the ball and which way will the goalkeeper dive to attempt to deny him a goal?

The Red Bulls midfielder knows something about that. He is six for six this MLS season in putting away those spot kicks.

No. 6 came on Saturday night, when Morgan converted his attempt in the 78th minute to transform a 1-1 deadlock into a 2-1 victory over New England Revolution at Red Bull Arena.

“It’s just game of cat and mouse with a goalkeeper and keeping your cool in that moment,” he told MSG Network after the game. “Me against the goalkeeper. That’s what I like. So always, always focusing.”

Minutes before the PK, Morgan was taken down in the box by Tommy McNamara, although no call was made by referee Alex Chilowicz. Morgan stated his case and Chilowicz went to VAR to double check. It was ruled a penalty and Morgan was going to take it, given his perfect conversions this season.

He fired a shot into the lower left corner as Djordje Petrovic held his ground and didn’t move.

“I’m so confident when I get penalties,” said Morgan, who said that he works on his penalty kicks at every training session.

Wait! There’s more. He said that he does one-on-one research with the enemy.

“After every single game, I’m asking other team’s goalkeeper if I had a penalty where [would] they go? I’m collecting all information all the time,” Morgan said. “And the last few goalkeepers. I’ve asked and they’ve all said they were going to go the other way. So this week, I worked on putting the ball to that side, something I hadn’t done so far this week. And again, speak to the keepers there because I’ve mixed it up. He thought it was going to go down the middle.”

Morgan’s latest penalty kick conversion gave him 14 goals this MLS season and 17 across all competitions to help the Red Bulls record their comeback win.

The Scottish midfielder moved into a tie with Sacha Kljestan for fifth in Red Bulls history with six penalty-kick goals. His six PKs are tied for the club single season record, matching Amado Guevara (2004, 2005) and Bradley Wright-Phillips (2014).

“Personally, the first half performance was amazing from the boys, especially off the ball,” he said. “I thought it was probably one of our most complete performances. I think we had to maybe up the tempo a little bit. But when we went to goal down, never did that think that we weren’t going to win this game. Some days, you just got a feeling and I knew the boys would answer today. We all have that trust in each other. We spoke about trust all the time. We knew that how we were performing, we were going to eventually beat them down.”

Front Row Soccer editor Michael Lewis has covered 13 World Cups (eight men, five women), seven Olympics and 25 MLS Cups. He has written about New York City FC, New York Cosmos, the New York Red Bulls and both U.S. national teams for Newsday and has penned a soccer history column for the Guardian.com. Lewis, who has been honored by the Press Club of Long Island and National Soccer Coaches Association of America, is the former editor of BigAppleSoccer.com. He has written seven books about the beautiful game and has published ALIVE AND KICKING The incredible but true story of the Rochester Lancers. It is available at Amazon.com.