Mccrum The Penalty Kick

The Story of a Gamechanger
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-912559-73-2
Verlag: Notting Hill Editions
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

'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.

Robert McCrum is a writer whose most recent book, Shakespearean, was published to great acclaim in 2021. He is also the author of Wodehouse: A Life (2004) and a classic memoir My Year Off. As editor-in-chief of Faber & Faber, he published Peter Carey, Kazuo Ishiguro, Marilynne Robinson, Lorrie Moore and Milan Kundera, among many others, and was subsequently literary editor of the Observer from 1996-2008.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mccrum, Robert

Leseproben

Chapter One

Mbappé’s Kiss

Powerbrand

‘Everything is theory,’ said the German, but Mbappé’s kiss tells us that football is more serious than that. Theory, or money, or global sponsors (Adidas, Coca-Cola, Wanda, Hyundai/Kia, Qatar Airways, Visa and Qatar Energy): football is about so much more than merely playing the ball. The modern game lies at the secret heart of a greater Game – the skein of everyday life that’s woven from memory, history and events; childhood and school; family, work and friendship; plus money, TV and the marketplace. To some fans it’s a way of life, a habit of being, and the most sublime obsession.

Football shirts, socks and boots; aprons and shower curtains; rulers, kitchen towels, sleeping bags, travel mugs, napkins, tablecloths, toffee tins, first-aid kits, memo pads, book bags, pencil sharpeners, key chains, fridge magnets, ring binders, address books, envelopes, wastebaskets and even garden gnomes: such are the ephemera that define the gaudy global commerce of football. The World Cup’s money-tree has promoted countless other products, too. In 2022, consumer electronics (Vivo), dairy and soy food (Mengniu), home-and-away kit (Hummel) and footwear (Puma; Nike), contributed to the phenomenon advertisers call a ‘powerbrand’, where the sport’s global status seems so natural that we take every aspect of its role for granted. (In 2015, the seamy side of this omnipotence fell under the spotlight with the dramatic prosecution of some shocking revelations about FIFA corruption.)

This all-conquering game, in its various guises (football in the UK; soccer in the US; calcio in Italy; Fußball in Germany), often claims a worldwide audience of billions. In the most impetuous versions, this can become a figure that exceeds the world’s actual population by a factor of four or five. From the wilder shores of hyperbole, it’s also been claimed that Striker, America’s World Cup mascot, had an audience of more than a trillion viewers. In truth, only God is the game’s undisputed rival on earth: more people across the planet will pray in church than go to football matches. The Pope may be just a deputy, but his audience more than equals those damned to football.

Leave the Almighty to His inscrutable mysteries, follow Mammon, and you’ll encounter a monetised vocabulary, commensurate with the sport’s global reach, that can be expressed in billions. Football’s contribution to the British economy, for example, is more than two billion in sterling. (In 2023, the emergent American ‘soccer’ market was reliably reported to yield $3.02 billion.) Qatar 2022, meanwhile, is expected to surpass revenues of $6.5 billion, topping the earnings of every previous tournament, a figure four times the turnover generated in Korea and Japan during 2002.

The headline to this story is unequivocal. Football promises the Midas touch of unprecedented rewards. An era of unaccountable riches has also blessed the sport with star players of extraordinary quality and panache. The torch carried by Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi has now passed to Kylian Mbappé and Erling Haaland. Sadly, these prodigies have been accompanied by casino salaries, a rigged market and the ominous reverberations of financial scandal, especially in any negotiations surrounding the administration of the World Cup.

FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) remains on probation. To some, at the domestic league level, a spendthrift free-for-all has provided astounding entertainment while betraying the essence of the sport itself. It’s claimed that the purchase of multi-million-pound superstars makes the game soulless. Among the purists of the game, a tide of sleaze has severed the bond of trust between the clubs and the public. Worse, a virtuous eco-system defined by social mobility and athletic prowess has been trashed. According to this reading, a football community ruined by reckless cashing-in is in urgent need of reform.

It wasn’t always like this. Football began among the poor and outcast, in a meadow. Those encounters were rough and lawless: the origins of world football are as brutal and basic as a sodden leather ball. But it’s one of the game’s more remarkable qualities that it has always been on the lookout for a better, modern story. That quest takes us deep into an old debate about hearts vs. brains, physical prowess against tactical cunning. At the end of the last century, the philosopher Alistair Macintyre once wrote: ‘You can’t know what to do until you know what story you’re part of.’ As in so many arenas of popular culture, football’s narrative used to be simpler, straighter and easier to regulate.

In the age of Tik-Tok and X/Twitter, football as a Powerbrand projects a sleek, super-choreographed account of itself, in many iterations of fantasy. As creatures of a storytelling species, we spectators respond to football’s rival tales: inspired by archetypical characters, incessant conflict and competition, the frisson of jeopardy and many minor miracles of performance. Whatever the fans believe, however, this is not written in the stars. The so-called ‘beautiful game’ has no divine right to its self-image, and its sport was not always this glossy.

Ancient history records many examples of games with balls. However, it was not until medieval times, when team-sponsored ball games began to flourish in the Celtic societies of the far-west in Europe (Ireland, Brittany and parts of Normandy) that a recreation with some, but not all, of the characteristics of contemporary football began to emerge. At first, in the wild and thuggish parts of the British Isles, it was mainly mayhem. In 1314, an English law enacted in the name of Edward II denounced ‘a great uproar in the city, through certain tumults arising from great footballs in the fields of the public, from which many evils arise’.

In the nineteenth century, that ferocious crucible of the industrial revolution, a new, and occasionally darker, violence was released. Before the formation of the FA (The Football Association) in 1863, football was not merely raw, but dangerous. In Northern England (including Ulster) during the 1880s and 90s, the game was bloody, and occasionally lethal. Shameless cheating, punch-ups and brawls, sometimes culminating in pitched battles, were typical of late-Victorian matches, but the FA could not decide how to judge such crimes and what, exactly, should be the proper sanction. The matter remained unresolved. Today, that’s a lost world. Only the traditional ferocities inspired by Glasgow’s Celtic vs. Rangers fixtures linger as a reminder of those times.

Celtic vs. Rangers contests that ended in riots used to be commonplace. Within living memory, one Old Firm game in 1975 provoked no fewer than two attempted murders, two meat cleaver and one axe attack, nine stabbings and thirty-five common assaults. Underlying this violence was the fact that Celtic are Roman Catholic and Rangers Protestant. (Similarly, on Merseyside, traditional expat-Irish divisions animate an old Liverpool vs. Everton rivalry.) Meanwhile, in Ireland itself, where the penalty kick was conceived, ancient tribal and religious loyalties once inspired the Irish punk band Pope Paul and the Romans (sometimes known as the Bollock Brothers) to sing ‘Why Won’t Rangers Sign a Catholic?’ In that arena, religion, sport, and politics were indistinguishable. Out of this maelstrom, an eccentric and fervent spirit of modernisation would inspire this young Scots-Irishman, a public-spirited amateur footballer from Ulster with complicated aspirations to Britishness, to launch his mission to pacify ‘the fields of the public’ for future generations.

The Fields of the Public

‘The Ancients knew the ball, but football is born of modernity,’ writes the sport’s historian David Goldblatt, entertaining the paradox that, just as the game was disappearing from the popular customs of English village life, it would be rescued from obscurity by the elite footballing fraternity of privileged young amateurs such as William McCrum. By the middle of the Victorian century, sports such as rowing, cricket and especially football, had become integral to ‘the curriculum and ethos of the public school’. Only one question remained: what sort of football? Was it permissible, for instance, to handle the ball? Rugby School, with an oval-shaped ball known as a ‘quanco’, had one answer, while Eton College had another in the Field game.

Football, as we know it, had still not become the modern game; it remained a sport for toffs. As Goldblatt writes in The Ball is Round, it was ‘a minor recreational pastime for a very narrow stratum of Victorian society.’ A few elite clubs, such as the Corinthians, in crisp white shirts and dark shorts, and renowned for their ‘sportsmanship’, nurtured the flame of the amateur ideal with disdain for modernity. Still, aristocrats and professionals, gentlemen from the public schools and players from the factories, would compete on the same pitch. The coming trend – horrors – was towards professionalism, but the DNA of English amateurism was braided into the game’s...