There are few moments in sports more dramatic than a penalty kick. All of the action on a soccer field comes down to two players: one trying their best to score, one trying their best to stop their opponent from doing so. In his new book The Penalty Kick: The Story of a Gamechanger, Robert McCrum explores the sporting and psychological aspects of the penalty kick — all the while incorporating his own family’s history into the process.
McCrum’s books have covered a wide ground, encompassing everything from the enduring influence of Shakespeare to his recuperation after a devastating stroke. For The Penalty Kick, McCrum chose a topic close to home: his great-grandfather Willie McCrum is the inventor of the rule that gives the book its name. And in telling the story of the penalty kick, McCrum had to reckon with generational dynamics along with more traditional sports history — including the saga of recently departed England manager Gareth Southgate.
InsideHook spoke with McCrum about exploring his family’s shifting dynamic and his own experiences watching soccer over the years.
InsideHook: Part of your book deals with your family’s history, and part of it deals with the sporting implications of the penalty kick. When did you first become aware that your own family’s history was so connected to the sport of soccer and this groundbreaking rule?
Robert McCrum: The answer begins with the village of Milford itself, which is where the family had the mill. The first time I went there, I was shown what was then a muddy field, which is where the kick had been pioneered. So they all knew about it. But it was only with the Good Friday Agreement and the economic rejuvenation of the North, and the pressures on the village from developers, that they began to see this might be a solution to the problem of how to cope with developers: to make the village a historic site.
It’s a story I’d known for 20 or 30 years. But it wasn’t one which anyone had made much of, although as the book also describes, my family was very ambivalent about their Irishness. And so that was never discussed. So you’ve got a combination of my consciousness becoming more attuned to the fact of it, and the village’s consciousness being attuned to the publicity of it.
So my story and the village story sort of came together. But you’re quite right to imply that really these two strands are very far apart, and the point at which they connect is pretty marginal, frankly.
You’ve written several books over the years. How did you decide on the particular structure of this to combine a familial memoir with ruminations on both the sport of football itself and the psychological implications of the penalty kick?
It evolved. This was a commission from a little publisher in London called Notting Hill Editions. The format is a short book, either a short book or a long essay. I was confronted with a storytelling question: how to tell the story, and how to weave these two threads into a single braid.
What you have is an imperfect solution to a very complicated problem. I’m sure you’re very familiar with the vast literature on the penalty kick. Those books would fill 10 shelves in a library. There are a lot of books on penalty kicks. There are almost no books on the linen business of Northern Ireland. There are very few, because it’s all gone.
I was very impressed by the reading that you did for this book and the references to other works. How much of that did you do in the process of writing this? And how much of that had you already done?
To be perfectly honest, I’m not that well-versed. Anyone who knows about football — you call it soccer, I think — would know that I’m not well-versed in it. Friends of mine who know about football say, “You’ve done a good job in trying to con the reader that you know.” But actually, I really don’t.
I had to learn what had to be learned as much as I could about this game and the sport and the penalty kick in order to write that part of it. But this story, it’s been in my family for my entire life. And so the [first half] is a book that’s been around in my head for about 50 years. So in a way, the literature that you very kindly refer to was part of my mental landscape. The question was, when would I start to deploy it? And how?
I wanted somebody who picked it up in the bookstore and could read it who wouldn’t need to know too much. I wanted it to be an enjoyable read and one which could slip down quite without too much trouble. And so I didn’t have too much theory or history. But on the other hand, it seems to me that in the context of our story, the Irishness of this invention is fascinating.
I also found a lot of the personal history to be absolutely fascinating. And the way that your family’s history kind of covers so much.
I think it’s a very sad family story. I mean, the football story is rather triumphant. The family story is rather bleak in many ways. And it’s peculiar, the cocktail of the triumph of football and the failure of the business is quite interesting.
In the second half of the book, to the extent that there is a central figure there, I would say it’s Gareth Southgate. How did you settle upon him as the central figure? And were you still working on this when he stepped down as manager of England?
No, I wasn’t. The book was done. The publishers and I tried adding an afterword. But it seemed to me that there’s no point. I mean, I fastened on him because I think the story of the penalty kick is really a game of two halves. It’s the invention of it in 1891 and its history until the 1960s, and the second half is the weaponization of the penalty kick through the shootout, 1970. And as you well know, the history of the shootout in England is dismal, disappointing. It’s a grim tale of sheer incompetence.
If you’re English or if you’re looking at the football story from the English perspective, Gareth Southgate is a gigantic figure, a man who brought sanity and reason and good psychology to the game. The reason I describe that is because it seems to me that he went through the fiery furnace of PR as a result of missing that kick in 1996. And it took him 20 years to get to the point when he could actually do something about it.
He’s not a great manager. I think it’s right that he’s gone. But he brought England as close to winning as anyone had ever done since 1966. I wanted to interview him. He wouldn’t talk. So there’s a Gareth Southgate-shaped hole in the book. I found it fascinating.
I don’t think I’d realized that there had been a stage play that had been based on his life and his experiences.
It’s more of a show than a play. And it may well come to Broadway. I’d be surprised if it did, but you never know. If you’re an England fan, it’s a terrific story. And it’s very well done. It was very well staged in London. They did it at the National Theatre on a very big stage with a very good cast. Joseph Fiennes played Southgate. And I was there on the first night and people were cheering. They were standing on their seats and cheering at the end, which doesn’t happen very often in the theater in England.
I understand the frustrations with Southgate, but as a fan of the U.S., if the men’s team ever reached the heights internationally that England did under Southgate, I would be thrilled.
He did very well with it, with what he had. And he’s a limited character from the point of view of inspiration or vision. He’s not a visionary. And it seems to me that to be a great manager, you have to have a vision about how to play the game and how to extract from your team. We’ve got a very good team. And maybe the new manager will win. We may take the cup.
But he could not put them together into a team that could win. I’m sure you must have watched some of the England games in the last World Cup or Euro 2024. If you actually watch those games, it’s excruciating: the things that they didn’t seem to be able to pull off, which they can do other times.
And, you know, everyone says that the English Premier League is one of the great leagues in the world, if not the greatest league in the world. So the Premier League should produce an all-star winning team, but it doesn’t. And that’s the conundrum.
Navigating the Booming Market of Retro Soccer Jerseys
In the cult of vintage kits, Messi gear is admired alongside obscure teams and players no one has ever heard ofAas someone who watches the sport, are there any other memorable penalty kicks that you can remember that stayed with you over the years?
Well, the one that I used at the beginning, Kylian Mbappé at the 2022 World Cup. That game was extraordinary; it went backwards and forwards and the shootout was very exciting. The English commentators were breathless, and so that was memorable.
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