The penalty kick has served many purposes in books. In Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski’s stats-driven study Soccernomics, there’s a chapter on the shoot-out at the 2008 Champions League final, the authors’ account of the psychological warfare between Manchester United’s goalkeeper, Edwin van der Sar, and Chelsea’s flappable striker Nicolas Anelka forming a sort of existentialist short story. Then there is the Austrian Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke’s 1970 novel The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, in which the set piece indicated by the title serves as the climax. The British sportswriter Ben Lyttleton and the Norwegian academic Geir Jordet have written rigorous studies of the psychology of penalty-taking – Twelve Yards and Pressure – that double as high-performance leadership manuals. Now, in The Penalty Kick, Robert McCrum has offered something else altogether, conflating personal and football history.

McCrum, a former literary editor, is the great-grandson of William ‘Willie’ McCrum (1865–1932), a cotton mill heir, inveterate gambler and amateur goalkeeper, who in 1890 invented the penalty kick. An Ulster Scot born outside the tiny village of Milford in County Armagh, close to the north–south border, Willie was part of a minority who ‘saw themselves as valiant incomers: more British than the British, yet in other ways, more Irish than the Irish, deeply settled outsiders’. Members of this community ‘would always feel under siege, not unlike some goalkeepers’, McCrum writes. In early versions of association football, the area around the goal was not cordoned off and games were lightly regulated – the author quotes as an example of ‘the extremes of violence endemic to Victorian football’ a match report that describes a goal being scored after the striker had ‘disposed of the goalkeeper’.

Willie, raised with his family’s ‘Presbyterian belief in fairness’ and having a position of influence within the Irish Football Association, submitted a proposal for the attacking side to have a free shot twelve yards from the goal line if the opposition has committed a foul in the area now known