The Penalty Kick by Robert McCrum

Football in the 1880s was an unruly,  rough, and often dangerous game. To curb the state the sport was in, William McCrum proposed a new and drastic sanction. He called it a penalty kick.'In 1891, a contentious new measure against an excess of foul play, Rule 13, was proposed to the FA by an amateur goalkeeper from County Armagh.

'The Irishman’s Motion' modernised the world’s most popular game. Today – in the shootout – Rule 13 continues to influence the sport through its astonishing psychological grip on our imaginations. A tale of sportsmanship, chance and obsession, The Penalty Kick explores both the addiction of risk, and a doomed father-son relationship that could have been torn from the pages of a late-Victorian novel, inspired by the edgy, ruthless and egalitarian spirit of Northern Ireland.