William McCrum, Robert McCrum and the story of the penalty kick

By Robert McCrum

The story of the penalty kick is one that I grew up with (originally, at one remove).

On the dining-room table during my childhood there was an impressive silver salver with this fascinating (to me) inscription:

Presented together with a chest of plate to William McCrum esq. on the occasion of his marriage. August 13th 1891. by the employes [sic] of Robert McCrum & Co.

This, of course, ignited any number of urgent questions, not least the one about my mysterious ‘employes’, and whatever had happened to ‘Robert McCrum & Co.’ ? Also: who was William, and where on earth had his vanished Victorian wedding taken place?

Uncovering family history

Gradually, over many years, I came to discover that William and Robert were my great and great-great grandparents respectively and that they had conducted their linen business in a village named Milford on the outskirts of Armagh in Northern Ireland during the last decades of the nineteenth century.

But it was not until I was in my thirties that I first visited Milford, with a BBC TV crew, directed by the young Pawel Pawlikowski, to make a one-hour documentary for the BBC2 series Bookmark entitled In The Blood. This little film has become, by chance, a strange and remarkable snapshot of Northern Ireland during the Troubles. It paints a picture of a model village (Milford) as an island of tranquillity amid a sea of horrific guerrilla warfare. But neither then, nor until the millennium, did anyone refer to the penalty kick.

Today, some twenty years on, when you drive into Milford from the Monaghan Road, you pass a hefty stone plinth which proudly advertises ‘The Home of the Penalty Kick’. Drive on a bit further and there’s a spanking new municipal square (McCrum Park) with a statue of William McCrum, my great-grandfather. Something has happened, and it’s all about my family and its strange, half-forgotten connection to Association Football at the end of the nineteenth century.

Approximately between the millennium and the pandemic of 2020, through several happy chances I came to discover the story behind this mysterious transformation. Not least because I found myself being approached by football journalists to explain my link to William McCrum and his father, Robert – my ancestor.

Writing the story of the penalty kick

By 2020 I thought I knew pretty much all there was to be known about this footnote to the history of global football. I could talk about my family, its linen fortunes in the North, and our connection to the doomed Titanic… Occasionally, I thought I should write it up to make peace with the past, but there was no time. Besides, I could not quite join up all the dots of the story. I knew I needed to do more research.

Then Covid struck.

During the first year of the pandemic, I used to go on walks in my neighbourhood, Ladbroke Grove, West London, and fell into a pattern of walking with Kim Kremer, the managing director of NHE, whom I knew very slightly. In answer to her polite questions about what I was working on (true answer: nothing), I would spin the story of the Penalty Kick, dismissing it as ‘a tale of family and football’. Of course, the more I talked about this strange little story of sportsmanship, chance and obsession, the more it lodged in my imagination.

With books, I find, one thing leads to another. Soon I was meeting Ros Porter, publishing director of NHE. Next thing I knew, I had a contract. Then, just over a year ago, I began to research my Penalty Kick story, telling it to myself as if for the first time. What I discovered was something far stranger, and more moving than anything I could ever have imagined.

So I wrote it all (or almost all) down: a tormented father-son relationship that could have been torn from the pages of a Victorian novel, a young man who believed in fair play, but lost his wife, ruined his family business, and died a pauper in the county hospital. A disappointed man, mixed up with this extraordinary sporting mini-drama, a moment of single combat with roots – perhaps! – in The Iliad, and other myths of heart-stopping jeopardy.

The penalty kick is often described by footballers as a ‘lottery’. In the finished book, The Penalty Kick: The Story of a Gamechanger, you will read all about the vicissitudes of its invention, the man who dreamed it up, the way it was shaped by his Irish experience, and how – after years of obscurity – it became, through the shoot-out, the one moment in the game that everyone talks about, a climax the young man who got married in 1891 to a femme fatale from the colonies could never have dreamed of.