A rousing history of the penalty kick and its introduction in English football by a famed British writer & editor. "Football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for ninety minutes and at the end, the Germans win." --Gary Lineker In the 1880s, football was a rough and often dangerous game. As a result, William McCrum, the heir to a linen fortune and a keen amateur goalkeeper in Co. Armagh, Northern Ireland, proposed a new and drastic sanction: a penalty kick that would admonish anyone--and their team--for not following the rules. At first the International Football Board resisted "the Irishman's Motion" as a restriction that would curb the players' freedom of expression, but the Penalty Kick was adopted in 1891 to almost immediate acclaim among fans and players. For about a hundred years, this extraordinary phenomenon has not only regulated the conduct of football, but has also inspired game theorists and infiltrated classics of contemporary literature.

An enthralling portrait of a lost age, The Penalty Kick: The Story of a Game-Change r looks at the history and meaning of an extraordinary phenomenon while examining the Penalty Kick's psychological--even philosophical--grip on our imaginations, with its distillation of risk and chance into an all-or-nothing moment.