He’s very conscious, he says, that those who have made the most difference in his own life are self-effacing people who often go unchampioned. “I’m not naturally like that. My wife is a naturally kind person and she’s had a very good influence on me. One of the nice things about One Dublin One Book is that friends of my mother have got in touch and said, ‘I didn’t know you were a writer,’ and I’m able to send them a copy and say, ‘This is inspired by kind people like you were to me.’” All this while the football team has a chance at a return from its own 25 year old exile – in this case from the top flight.

I remember reading Disgrace by JM Coetzee. Disgrace is a really interesting topic and it didn’t really deal with it in a way that I was expecting… Also, I had read an interview with Daniel Timofte, the guy who lost a penalty against Ireland for Romania… He hadn’t got over it. And people hadn’t let him get over it. And though he was a very talented footballer it was still the thing he was known for. The main theme of that book is life’s unfixability. I think our mentality at times is trying to fix the things in our life to allow us to move on to try and say, well, how can you move on if they’re not fixable? I found Panenka harder going; a lot depends on the reader’s understanding of and sympathy for a man permanently affected by failure on the football pitch. Hession has done his work so that you don’t have to like or understand football to follow the story, but if you’re immune to the appeal of team sports, a lot of imaginative work is required. I wanted to hit it right down the middle like I always did with penalties but a teammate told me that you were having trouble diving, that you stay in the centre of the goals and he changed my mind. It was a big mistake. Relationships never truly ended, and even when people faded from you their effect was preserved somewhere in the particle physics of experience where everything is a compound made up of traces of everything else.”

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a b "Antonin Panenka - the footballer Pele described as "either a genius or a madman" ". 20 June 2007. Archived from the original on 9 February 2011 . Retrieved 14 November 2010. Similarly, Hession’s conclusion to the story could be seen as a cop-out. But the success of Leonard and Hungry Paul suggests there’s a big appetite for gentler, less dramatic storytelling; and in our current anxious environment, Panenka’s rejection of the grim, in favour of small moments of grace, looks like a bold and successful choice. years previously a man misses a crucial penalty against his team’s deadliest rivals and feels that he bears the guilt for the disappointment of a whole community – now he has the chance of personal redemption and the team the chance of collective redemption. A book I read by conincidence immediately after England’s national wave of euphoria at the victory in the Euro 2021 Semi Finals - 25 years after the now national hero’s Gareth Southgate’s miss against Germany in the 1996 tournament. Panenka, the book, derives its name from this football term as the main character in the novel, Joseph, was given the name Panenka when his career took a nosedive that was to have a serious impact on his life and the path he took. Now in his fifties, Panenka is suffering from severe migraines, or as he calls them, his ‘Iron Mask.’ Living with his one-time estranged daughter, Marie-Thérèse and her young son, Arthur, he is in denial as to what the cause could be. He chooses to remain an anonymous individual in his hometown, living in an area known as the Crucible in a town that is obsessive over football and the local team Seneca FC. He drinks in the same pub, he goes to the same barbers, he has his own small group of friends. He doesn’t stand out. He just gets on with his life. Marie-Thérèse is now a trainee manager at a supermarket. Her marriage is in a funk and moving in with her Dad gave them an opportunity to reflect on past mistakes and right a few wrongs. Her mother has since left town, moving on with her own life, and Marie-Thérèse is now considering some life-changing decisions about hers and Arthur’s future.

There’s also a small cast of characters in novel and all have problems. There’s Panenka’s daughter, Marie-Therese who is suffering from imposter syndrome, who also has unresolved issues with her newly separated bar/café owner husband, Arthur, who has an unloving relationship with his wife and BABA, who has trouble fitting in.His name was Joseph, but for years they had called him Panenka, a name that was his sadness and his story ." Rónán Hession’s first novel, 2019’s Leonard and Hungry Paul, won the word-of-mouth success that small publishers dream of, and it hasn’t stopped rolling yet: shortlisted for half a dozen prizes, it recently made the One Dublin One Book choice for people across Hession’s home city to read. Germany are famously kings of the penalty shoot out - or rather elfmeterschießen - having won their last 6 in major tournaments, 4 at World Cups and 2 at the Euros ( https://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/deuts...) including twice against England. But their first major elfmeterschießen, and the only one in a final, was in 1976 when West Germany faced Czechoslovakia. The first 7 penalties were all scored, but Uli Hoeneß missed the eighth. That left Antonín Panenka with a chance to win the game - and the composed, almost poetic, penalty he took was such a surprise to both Sepp Maier in the German goal and to the watching millions, that it is, 45 years later, still called after him: a Panenka. Liverpool: Fabinho". Liverpool F.C. Archived from the original on 27 February 2023 . Retrieved 7 February 2023. Panenka, his next book, has football in it. It’s a moving story about a retired footballer grappling with a sense of failure. What inspired it? “I remember reading Disgrace by JM Coetzee,” he says. “Disgrace is a really interesting topic and it didn’t really deal with it in a way that I was expecting… Also, I had read an interview with Daniel Timofte, the guy who lost a penalty against Ireland for Romania… He hadn’t got over it. And people hadn’t let him get over it. And though he was a very talented footballer it was still the thing he was known for. The main theme of that book is life’s unfixability. I think our mentality at times is trying to fix the things in our life to allow us to move on to try and say, well, how can you move on if they’re not fixable?” Unashamedly optimistic

Serendipitously topical and (from the author of the word of mouth phenomenon “Leonard and Hungry Paul”) another wonderful antinode to the tendency to equate misanthropy and pessimism with literary merit. Leonard and Hungry Paul is one of my favourite reads of this year, so I was keen to read Hession's sophomore novel.All of the characters are beautifully crafted – even minor ones such as Marie-Theresa’s husband and BABA a menthe-drinking observer in the pub Panenka frequents are beautifully realised in all their life choices, motivations and hurts. Habituated loneliness was bearable, but the heart was not built to endure glimpses of what it could never truly have’ Panenka has to face a few realities about his own life, his future and his relationships, both past and present.