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The Penalty Kick : The Story of a Gamechanger

Robert McCrum
Format: Hardback
Publisher: Notting Hill Editions
Published: October 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781912559572
208 pages, 20 Plates, black and white
Country of publication: United Kingdom

£15.99

Football, in the 1880s, 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 Association 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 inspired game theorists and infiltrated classics of contemporary literature. An enthralling portrait of a lost age, The Penalty Kick 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.

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