The Penalty KickBy: Robert McCrum A rousing history of the penalty kick and its introduction in English football by a famed British writer & editor. Football, in the 1880s, was a rough and dangerous game. To address the abhorrent state of the sport, William McCrum, an amateur Irish goalkeeper and the author's great grandfather, proposed the penalty kick, a new and drastic sanction introduced to the game in 1891. For over a hundred years, this extraordinary phenomenon