La portera paró un penalti difícil y toda la grada aplaudió.

Yes. Portera is the feminine form of portero, so it tells you the goalkeeper is a woman.

• el portero = a male goalkeeper
• la portera = a female goalkeeper

In football Spanish, you may also hear guardameta, but portera is completely natural.

Paró is the preterite, which is used for a completed action in the past. It fits a single match event: she saved one specific penalty.

• paró = she saved/stopped
• paraba = she was saving / she used to save

In sports narration, the preterite is very common for the main events of the action.

Yes. Penalti is a very common word in Spain for a penalty kick or penalty in football.

Its plural is penaltis.

You may also hear penal, but penalti is extremely standard in Spain.

Because in Spanish, descriptive adjectives usually come after the noun.

So the normal order is:

• un penalti difícil = a difficult penalty

Putting difícil before the noun would sound unusual here and would add a more literary or emphatic tone.

Yes, it does agree, but difícil has the same form for masculine and feminine singular.

Compare:

• un penalti difícil
• una jugada difícil

The plural does change:

• penaltis difíciles
• jugadas difíciles

Here la grada means the stands or the seating area in a stadium.

It can also refer collectively to the people in those stands. So toda la grada aplaudió means that the whole crowd in the stands applauded.

Because la grada is being treated as a collective noun: one whole mass of spectators or one whole section of stands.

Spanish often uses a singular noun to refer to a group as one unit. So:

• toda la grada = the whole stand / the whole crowd in the stands

If you said todas las gradas, that would sound more like all the different stands or sections physically.

Because the verb agrees with the grammatical subject, not with the number of individual people involved.

The subject is toda la grada, which is singular, so the verb is singular too:

• toda la grada aplaudió

This is similar to English ideas like the crowd applauded, where many people are involved but the noun is singular.

The accent marks show the correct stress and help identify these as third-person singular preterite forms.

• paró = she/he saved, stopped
• aplaudió = she/he/it applauded

They are stressed on the last syllable:

• pa-RÓ
• a-plau-di-Ó

Because Spanish usually leaves out subject pronouns when the meaning is already clear from the verb form or the noun.

Here the subjects are already stated:

• La portera paró...
• toda la grada aplaudió

So adding ella would normally be unnecessary.

It is just a very natural, neutral Spanish word order for narration:

• La portera = subject
• paró = verb
• un penalti difícil = object
• y = and
• toda la grada = subject
• aplaudió = verb

Spanish can be flexible with word order, but this version sounds straightforward and normal, especially in a sports context.