My grandfather invented the penalty kick – but it was FIFA who weaponised it

As England approaches its first knockout game, Robert McCrum looks at the moment that all fans dread – the penalty shootout. As the grandson of the inventor of football’s ‘death or glory’ moment, he looks at the origins of Rule 13 once denounced as the ‘Irishman’s motion’

The shot from the spot has been terrorising keepers and kick-takers alike for more than 100 years (Alamy)

Here begins the end of England’s daydream that “football is coming home”, and the revival of our quadrennial nightmare, dubbed by one German writer “the fear of the penalty kick”. Such words do not begin to convey the abyss of consternation into which the so-called “beautiful game” can pitch us like cartoon figures. It’s apt, as we stare in horror at the TV screen, that the edge of the penalty area should resemble a D.

This year’s performance by the national team has already filled us with dread and her grim relatives – despair, dismay, disappointment and disgust. Compared with what may follow in the coming weeks, this kind of interim anxiety will be as nothing to the kind of agony provoked by the penalty shootout, a mind-bending cliffhanger every spectator can relate to.

Stand on the penalty spot in front of an open goal and you would be awed by the terrible – even suicidal – odds on offer. The zone defended by the goalkeeper is 24 feet wide by eight feet high, but it presents a target which, at close quarters, most dispassionate observers would consider impossible to miss. Professional keepers, indeed, will say that a yard inside each post is out of reach, and indefensible.