Faster than a speeding misogynist: Chloe Kelly’s England penalty has rattled all the right people

It was a hop, a skip, and a thump. Chloe Kelly - yellow ribbon in her hair, assured glint in her eye - is developing quite the knack for appearing at opportune moments to rescue England. Last summer, it was a stoppage time winner at Wembley, on Monday morning it was a decisive penalty in a barely-deserved shootout against Nigeria hit with such ferocity that it nearly took the net into Moreton Bay.

So fierce was said spot-kick, in fact, that it was clocked at a touch under 111 km/h, or 69 mph if you want to get all patriotic about it. That’s like trying to stop a hatchback in the middle lane of the M6. It also happens to be faster than any goal scored in the Premier League last season, with the closest comparison being Said Benrahma’s 66mph effort against Crystal Palace back in November. There are portmanteaus I could use to describe Kelly’s strike, but most of them begin with ‘thunder’ and end in words that would almost certainly get me sacked. Needless to say, it was sublime.

It has also irked a considerable number of insecure men on the internet, and in particular, a specific sort of man who cannot fathom how a woman could possess any kind of sporting prowess; the sort of man who refuses to believe that a female counterpart could connect with a dead ball so purely that it reaches 69 mph, but who is quite happy to trust in the conceited ambitions of an emerald-fuelled tech (silly) billionaire whenever he unveils a new pipe dream to catapult a papier mache rocket towards Mars. Maybe they just enjoy the phallic symbolism.

‘Lies! Lies! Lies!’, they cry in befuddled, vein-popping unison, unable to comprehend the faintest notion of a woman doing anything better than a man. ‘Forget the science, forget the technological advancements that have allowed us to accurately measure such metrics, it simply cannot be!’, they clumsily intimate. ‘Everybody knows that all of the power behind a penalty kick is generated in the scrotum!’

Now, in fairness to these fragile blokes, maybe they do actually have speed cameras for eyes. There’s no way of knowing for certain because many of them neglect to include their faces on their social media profiles. They also have a deep-rooted and, in their minds, justified scepticism towards the atypical claims of experts. Unless, of course, said expert is telling them to remortgage their family home so that they can purchase a hexagonal picture of a cartoon chimp in a sailor hat.

Because you see, that’s the thing here. It’s not that the sort of person disputing the veracity of Kelly’s piledriver is actually unconvinced by the suggestion that it is real. Instead, it is quite the opposite. They fear that it is indisputably verifiable, and that it would leave a small dint in the misogyny on which they construct large parts of their personality.

They have to tell themselves that men - a blanket term from beneath which they peak - are better than women, because the truth is, internally and personally, they’re not entirely sure they are better than anyone.