“If I’d missed that penalty, they might have sent me down a mine for 50 years. Instead I became a national hero” Antonin Panenka on the origin of his historic penalty

Antonin Panenka of Czechoslovakia at the 1980 European Championship.

When Antonín Panenka stepped up to take his penalty in the 1976 European Championship final shootout against West Germany, few of the 30,790 fans in attendance would have known they were about to see one of the game’s most famous spot-kicks of all time.

With Uli Hoeness having just missed his penalty, Panenka was handed the opportunity to win the tournament and duly delivered with an audaciously chipped spot-kick that has gone down in football lexicon.