Farewell, Floating Panenka, Until We See You Again We have probably not seen the last of penalty kicks at Euro 2012, but it's a good bet we've seen our last Panenka for a while. Because really: for all the courage and daring and confidence it took for Andrea Pirlo to pull one off against England's Joe Hart on Sunday, it would take twice as much - five times, 10 times as much - for a player to try another less than a week later. After all, the joy of the Panenka - that split second when you and the goalkeeper both realize, to your delight and to his horror, what has just happened - is in the surprise, right? But we really shouldn't be surprised. And England really should not have been. For all the descriptions of Pirlo's kick for Italy on Sunday - steely, brave, cheeky, audacious - his was merely the latest in a long line of imitations. The kick was born in a Euro final 36 years ago, but it has been attempted everywhere in the years since. It is brilliant in its simplicity, and frightening in its temerity. But to truly appreciate the Panenka - especially the big-game Panenka like Pirlo's - one must first know its history. Antonin Panenka was a Czechoslovakian midfielder with a hitman's mustache and - one must suspect - a mischievous twinkle in his eye. He spent most of his career with the since-bankrupted Prague club Bohemians, and it was on that club's practice field, he told a radio interviewer in 2007, that he came up with the idea to chip penalty kicks behind a diving goalkeeper. Nobody had ever taken a penalty like that before. I came up with the idea because I used to practice penalties after training at Bohemians with our goalkeeper Zdenek Hruska. To make it interesting, we used to wager a beer or a bar of chocolate on each penalty. Unfortunately, because he was such a good keeper, I ended up losing money as he kept saving more shots than I could score. As a result I ended up lying awake at night thinking about how I could get the upper hand. I eventually realized that the goalkeeper always waits until just before the last moment to try and anticipate where the ball is going and dives just before it's kicked so he can reach the shot in time. I decided that it was probably easier to score by feinting to shoot and then just gently tapping the ball into the middle of the goal. In this way the keeper had always dived by the time the ball was kicked and had no chance of recovering in time to save the shot. I tried it out on the training ground and it worked like a charm. Still, it took guts to try it out when it counted, and even more to try the one that made Panenka famous. That kick came against West Germany in the final moment of the final of the 1976 European Championships, which was then a four-team tournament and the first major international competition decided by a penalty shootout. By then, Panenka said, he was certain it would work. About two years before the European Championships I began trying it. At first I did it during friendly matches and then I did it once or twice during Czechoslovak league matches. It worked so well that I decided that I would use the technique if I got a penalty at the European Championships. Of course, it was pure chance that the opportunity came in the final after the Germans equalized in the last minute and then, when it went to penalties, the German player missed his kick before it was my turn. It was like the will of god. I was one thousand percent certain that I would take the penalty in that way and that I would score. Panenka took a long, hard run-up and then chipped the ball where the legendary German goalkeeper Sepp Maier had just been standing. It was the first penalty shootout Germany ever contested, and it remains the only one it ever lost. "I suspect that he doesn't like the sound of my name too much," Panenka said of Maier later, in an interview with Uefa.com. I never wished to make him look ridiculous. Pelé called it the work of "either a genius or a madman," and Panenkas have been tried by both over the years. Zinedine Zidane tried a daring one in the 2006 World Cup final. Sebastian Abreu of Uruguay sent his team to the semifinals in 2010 with another, though it must be noted that Abreu, like Pirlo and Francesco Totti, is a serial Panenkite. It takes a special kind of person to try one in front of a full stadium, one with the willingness and the confidence to try to do something wonderful at the risk of doing something foolish. But the best players are always trying to push the limits, to do the unexpected, to go where lesser players are afraid to go and try what they would never dare. And that's why Panenka's gift to soccer is such a treasure. Every Panenka, because you can never truly predict when it's coming, arrives as a delightful present. Until one doesn't. And that is why you probably won't see another one this week.