The penalty kick was first proposed to the Football Association as a drastic sanction against dangerous conduct in 1891. Tabled by an amateur goalkeeper from Armagh, it was rejected as an affront to the nobility of the game. How, in a sport played by gentlemen, could there be any foul play? It was, they said, an insult to assume that “players intend to behave like cads”.
The toffs who ran the FA disdained the penalty kick as “the Irishman’s motion”, and took some persuading to accept Rule 13. But they weren’t wrong. The measure was inspired by the edgy, ruthless, and egalitarian spirit of Northern Ireland.
On TV, the penalty kick looks like the humiliation of a doomed defender. Actually, a third of such shots will fail: it’s an enthralling agony that takes us to the brink of joy, dread, hope, rage and exhilaration, as if time itself stood still.
Was it unfair? Ulster Protestants are a wild bunch prone to risk. Remaking a sinful world was a Presbyterian passion. The heir to a linen fortune who sponsored this contentious measure was my great-grandfather, from Milford, in County Armagh. It was the pinnacle of his career, motivated by a father-son relationship torn from the pages of a Victorian novel.
The first time I visited the grave of William McCrum, and began to explore Milford, was during the Troubles. Our family’s community lies on the edge of “bandit country”. There was killing in the air; no one referred to football. Twenty-five years after the Good Friday agreement, when you drive into the village from the Monaghan Road, you’ll pass a stone plinth advertising the “Home of the Penalty Kick”. Further on, there’s a municipal park with a statue of “the inventor”.
The story behind this mysterious transformation is a strange tale of family and football that’s about Ireland, sportsmanship, chance and obsession. The best fairytales inspire miracles of hope. Through the shootout, the penalty kick conjures a story that unites everyone.
Willie McCrum had no knowledge of this phenomenon. His fate is a parable of the province and its history: an inheritor of means who believed in fair play, he lost his wife, ruined his family and died a pauper. But his invention lives on as a cathartic moment in a global sport, a gamechanger.
Modern football is a multi-billion dollar beast – and some people still pretend that it’s “only a game”. A way of life, and the most sublime addiction, to many fans, this game lies at the secret heart of a greater game – the skein of everyday life that’s woven from memory and events; childhood and school; recreation, work and friendship.
The invention of the shootout has added to the drama, a self-contained moment of enthralling dread that has inspired an audience among viewers who could hardly care less about the sport. To diehard fans, that’s a source of profound anguish.
Perhaps they should recognise the power of archetypes in classic storytelling. Is it fanciful to suggest that Homer is where the penalty shoot-out began? In the Iliad, the moment we find Achilles sulking in his changing-room over an intolerable slight to his heroic prowess (actually, it’s all about a girl) we’re in single-combat territory.
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The film director Alfonso Cuarón says such moments become “a western duel, two guys facing each other”. Harry Kane will be at home with the kind of life-and-death psychology known to Hector or Menelaus, and even Sergio Leone.
For years, until Gareth Southgate’s management, the England team wrestled with penalties. Now they have “penalty-kick consultants” steeped in the black arts of “choking”. That’s another story.
The Penalty Kick by Robert McCrum is published by Notting Hill Editions
