Callum Cumiskey of Armagh scores a penalty past Derry goalkeeper Odhran Lynch during the Ulster GAA Football Senior Championship Final match between Armagh and Derry at St Tiernach’s Park in Clones, Monaghan. Photo by Harry Murphy/Sportsfile.
By Dónal McAnallen
Penalty-kicks have become the decisive factor in ever more Gaelic football matches over recent years. Much less certainty has existed about the backstory of the cic éirice in the game. It is known to have been an adaptation of the spot-kick in soccer, and some people can also tell you that it was invented by an Armagh man for the association game. When and how exactly it was introduced to Gaelic fields seems to be a matter of mystery, however.
Until now, that is. It can now be confirmed that the penalty-kick was brought into Gaelic football a full century ago, in 1923.
The chief reason for the confusion is that the GAA did not use the term ‘penalty kick’ in the early years. Since William McCrum of Milford, Armagh, first proposed such a kick in 1890, and the International Football Association Board adopted it the following year, the penalty had become firmly established as a core component of soccer.
For the next thirty-plus years, the GAA rules allowed only free-kicks as punishment for rule infringements. By the early 1920s, however, there was a recognition that attacking teams in Gaelic football needed more reward for fouls committed close to goal.
THE 1923 RULE-CHANGE
Hence GAA officials decided to tweak Rule 10.2, headlined ‘Free Kick’, in 1923. The rule already stated, ‘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’; and to this was added, ‘all players but the goal-keeper to stand clear of the scoring space’.
This crucial but rather cryptic insertion in the Official Guide, 1923-24 edition, was the first time that a one-on-one set-piece between kicker and keeper was created in the Gaelic code.
The method of its introduction is not exactly clear. Reports of the 1923 Congress were dominated by other debates, and it may have been added later on in the year. Not all changes to the printed playing-rules were settled by congresses back then.
The only historical text that identified the significance of this rule-change was Joe Lennon’s magisterial Towards a Philosophy for Legislation in Gaelic Games (1999). As far in as page 672, the former All-Ireland winning-captain with Down referred to this change simply as ‘the birth of the penalty kick’.
Two years later, a special committee appointed by the 1925 Congress put forward a revision that was accepted. The last clause was change to specify, ‘all players, with the exception of the defending goal-keeper and the player taking the kick, to stand outside the 21 yards line’.
The purpose was becoming clearer, and the kick was becoming closer to what we know today, yet it was not called a penalty kick. Such a term savoured too much of soccer, at a time when the Gaelic body was striving to demarcate itself as much as possible from the English game, and Ireland – through the Free State in the first instance – was seeking to assert its independence from England. To copy the name of the soccer rule would be tantamount to an admission of inferiority if not subjugation.
Confusion over the origins of the Gaelic spot-kick also owes to the rarity of such awards over the next few decades. They appear to have been given only for infractions inside the ‘parallelogram’ in the early years. The tendency of some reporters to use the word ‘penalty’ for free-kicks in general blurs the question again.
One of the few newspapers to pick up on the impact of the 1923 rule-change was the Connaught Telegraph. In July 1925 its correspondent reported on a recent Mayo penalty and advised:
‘This type of kick should invariably result in a goal – too much force is, of course, apt to produce inaccuracy. A judicious, well-placed tap is the correct procedure in these circumstances. Players should practise this.’
Damien Cahalane of Castlehaven reacts after making a save during the penalty shoot-out during the AIB Munster GAA Football Senior Club Championship Final match between Dingle, Kerry, and Castlehaven, Cork, at TUS Gaelic Grounds in Limerick. Photo by Tom Beary/Sportsfile.
VIDEO EVIDENCE
Now, however, we have video evidence to show what a de facto penalty-kick looked like in Gaelic football during the 1920s.
The evidence is to be found on a short video, from one of the first filmed Gaelic matches outside Croke Park. It’s a Gaumont Graphic News reel of a Gold Medal Tournament game, Tyrone versus Antrim, in May 1929. The venue was The O’Neill Park, Dungannon – not then in the Lisnahull estate where the same-named ground is today, but in the Springfield area where the town golf club was later built and a young Darren Clarke mastered his own dead-ball striking technique.
For an Ulster tournament fixture to appear on the cinema bill before the latest Hollywood feature film was no common thing. This one appears to have been recorded because the ball was thrown in by Joseph Stewart MP, who was newsworthy as he had been declared elected for East Tyrone the previous day.
This fast-paced 48-second reel is significant for a very different reason almost a century on. At the very end, one can see a player taking a spot-kick from 14 yards out, directly opposite the goal. It looks like a penalty-kick today, albeit with one notable distinction – 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, it was the way the rule was applied more generally.
THE KICKER OF THE 1929 PENALTY
The kick was casually described as a ’14 yards penalty’ Ulster Herald, in its report of the match. The kicker was the Tyrone 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 in Dungannon as his own parish had no team then. A strapping lad, Mallon made his Tyrone debut in 1925, aged just 18, and he was selected on the first-ever Ulster team in the Railway Cup, two years later. Having also played soccer and taken penalties for Dungannon Athletic FC, he seemed the right candidate to kick a Gaelic penalty when few had experience of taking them. Alas for him, this was one was saved by the Antrim cúlbáire, Murphy.
Mallon played for Tyrone up to 1931. The rest of his life is largely unknown. Some say he joined An Garda Síochána, before going to England. Somewhere, it seems, he contracted tuberculosis. He died too young at 31 in 1938.
CARNEY’S KICK IN ‘48
Even then, the penalty-kick, though becoming more commonplace, was not fully embraced as a Gaelic thing. The 1939 Official Guide still did not use the term. A Wexford motion to the 1940 Congress, to the extent 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.
Gradually, things changed during the 1940s. Pádraig Carney’s spot-kick goal for Mayo against Cavan was a first for an All-Ireland final. 25 years on from its arrival in the rule-book, the penalty-kick was at last being accepted as part of the Gaelic game.
95 years on, in 2018, Central Council moved to legislate for penalty shootouts for knockout games. This decision, rubberstamped by the 2019 Congress, has led to a flurry of nail-biting ‘sudden death’ finishes at county and national levels.
To many fans, the penalty shootout itself may remain anathema to their views of Gaelic football tradition. Whatever of the shootout, however, the penalty-kick itself is a grand old centenarian, indeed the senior of many playing-rules we now take for granted.
Dónal McAnallen is a member of the GAA’s national History Committee; Library and Archives Manager for National Museums NI; and Contributing Editor of A Place to Play: The People and Stories behind 101 Gaelic Grounds (Merrion Press), in collaboration with Humphrey Kelleher.