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

As Cristiano Ronaldo feels the full tension of the knockout moment every football fan dreads , Robert McCrum, the grandson of the inventor of the penalty kick, reflects on its origins and how it was turned into the beautiful game’s ‘high noon’

Cristiano Ronaldo weeps after missing a penalty in extra time (Getty Images)

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.