Very few footballers have a technique named after them. Antonín Panenka has one, and he earned it with a single kick.
It came in the 1976 European Championship Final between Czechoslovakia and West Germany. With the shootout on the line, Panenka chipped the ball softly down the middle as the goalkeeper threw himself to one side. It was the decisive penalty, and nobody watching had seen anything like it before.
What happened to the Panenka after 1976?
It spread. Zidane, Pirlo, Messi and Totti are among the players who have copied it, along with countless others. The word is now standard football vocabulary, used in every language that talks about the game.
The part that still stands out is the setting. He did not try it in a friendly or a league match that meant little. He tried it in a final, with his country's honour at stake, when a miss would have made him a national joke for years.
That one kick in 1976 gave the game a new way of taking a penalty, and that is why the Czech sits at number 3.
Tomorrow: number 2.
