Penalty kicks have been a big talking point of Gaelic football over recent years. The advent of penalty shootouts to settle drawn matches has made the spot-kick more contentious and accentuated its perceived foreignness to Gaelic sports. Yet, it transpires that the Gaelic penalty-kick has existed for a whole century.
100 years ago, copies of the 1923/24 edition of the GAA’s Official Guide were being circulated and read by Gaelic officials nationwide. Few could have noticed a subtle change to the playing rules, however.
At some stage between the GAA Congress of April 1923 and the rule-book’s publication months later, a short addendum was made to Rule 10.2, headlined ‘Free Kick’.
The revised text read as follows: ‘The Referee must bring back the ball to the 14 yards line for a foul occurring in the parallelogram and entitling the attacking side to a free kick, all players but the goalkeeper to stand clear of the scoring space’.
This rather cryptic clause was the first reference to a one-on-one set-piece, kicker versus keeper, in the Gaelic code.
The word ‘penalty’ was not used, and no fuss surrounded its introduction. Indeed, its precise origin is unclear as reports of the 1923 Congress focused on other debates. Perhaps the insertion was decided by Central Council officials later in the year; not all changes to the printed playing rules were settled by Congresses back then.
Only Joe Lennon’s landmark tome, Towards a Philosophy for Legislation in Gaelic Games (1999), has previously identified the significance of the 1923 rule-change. On page 672, Down’s victorious captain of 1968 mentions it fleetingly as ‘the birth of the penalty kick’.
How can such a significant rule-change have crept into the rules so stealthily?
It seems that GAA officials had concluded that the conventional free-kick was no longer adequate punishment for aggressive fouls committed close to goal in Gaelic football, but to call the new set-piece a ‘penalty’ would be too much, too soon.
The penalty-kick had been in operation in association football since 1891, one year after its first proposal by William McCrum of Milford, Armagh. To be seen to copy this soccer staple was not a risk that GAA officials were going to take in the 1920s.
After the turmoil of the War of Independence and the Civil War, it would not fit well with their goal of a Gaelic nation-state to admit to imitating the laws of a game that was forbidden to GAA members to play.
Such coyness prevailed for years. In 1925, a proposal from an appointed special committee led to the rule’s revision to specify, ‘all players, with the exception of the defending goalkeeper and the player taking the kick, to stand outside the 21 yards line’.
The kick was becoming closer to what we know today, but not in name.
Few Gaelic spot-kicks were awarded over the next few decades, being given only for infractions inside the ‘parallelogram’ at first.
Besides the rarity of spot-kicks, the tendency of some reporters to use the word ‘penalty’ for free-kicks in general blurred the story of their evolution further.
The Connaught Telegraph, almost alone among newspapers, picked up on the impact of the 1923 rule change.
In July 1925 its correspondent reported on a recent Mayo penalty and advised against ‘too much force’ in such kicks: ‘A judicious, well-placed tap is the correct procedure in these circumstances. Players should practise this.’
Video evidence has emerged to show what a de facto penalty-kick looked like in Gaelic football in those years.
It is to be found on a Gaumont Graphic News reel of a Gold Medal Tournament game, Tyrone versus Antrim, in May 1929 – as far as we know, the first-ever filmed Gaelic match in Ulster.
O’Neill Park, Dungannon, was the venue – not then in the Lisnahull estate where the same-named ground is today, but on the Donaghmore Road, close to the town’s golf club where a young Darren Clarke mastered his own dead-ball striking technique.
For an Ulster tournament fixture to appear on a cinema bill before studio feature films was unusual. Its recording appears to have been intended primarily to capture Joseph Stewart, who was declared elected as MP for East Tyrone the previous day, throwing in the ball.
At the very end of this fast-paced 48-second reel, a player is seen taking a spot-kick from 14 yards out, directly opposite the goal. It resembles a penalty kick today, except that several players stood between the end-line and the 14-yard line, to the right side of the post.
It seems likely that if this was allowed in an inter-county game, that was the accepted line-up for Gaelic penalty-kicks then.
The kicker was Tyrone’s full-back, Malachy Mallon. Born in Fermanagh, and a son of RIC head-constable Barney Mallon, Malachy lived at Ballymackilduff, Eglish, but played for Clarke’s GAA Club, Dungannon, as his own parish had no team.
A strapping lad, Mallon debuted for Tyrone in 1925, aged just 18, and two years later he was selected on the first-ever Ulster team in the Railway Cup.
Having also played soccer and taken penalties for Dungannon Athletic FC, he seemed the right candidate to kick this one among unpractised Gaelic players. The Antrim cúl báire, S Murphy, brought his own expertise to bear and saved.
Mallon played for Tyrone up to 1931. His last years are relatively unknown. Some say he joined An Garda Síochána, before going to England. He was back home, working as a shop assistant in 1938, when he died of tuberculosis, aged just 31 years.
Even then, the penalty-kick, though, becoming more commonplace, was not fully accepted as a Gaelic thing.
The 1939 Official Guide still did not use the term. A Wexford motion to the 1940 Congress, to clarify that ‘when a player is pulled down by an opposing back inside the 14 yards mark, a penalty kick be given opposite goal,’ was lost.
The picture began to change during the 1940s. Pádraig Carney’s spot-kick goal for Mayo against Cavan in 1948 was a first for an All-Ireland final. 25 years after sneaking into the rule-book, the Gaelic penalty kick was at last being embraced in practice and in name.
Ninety-five years on, in 2018-19, the GAA hierarchy’s adoption of penalty shootouts for knockout games has highlighted the spot-kick more than ever.
A raft of such endings at all levels have caused nail-biting excitement but annoyed stalwarts who see the penalty shootout as an affront to Gaelic sports tradition or simply unfair.
Whatever of today’s debates, the Gaelic penalty-kick predated sideline-kicks, open hand-passes, free-kicks from hands and forward marks by many years, and is now a grand old centenarian.