A goalless draw
SOON it will be penalty time for anyone not stirred to fever pitch by the impending fulmination in Brazil. If you can’t keep your eye on the ball, you are going to be sidelined. You know the score. It is going to be impossible to avoid the beautiful game, the funny old game, or the pestilential plague, depending on which side you pick.
As if we have ever been able to avoid it. Football has planted its studded boot firmly on the neck of language, and no amount of whining and dribbling is going to send it off. Given that ball sports have been popular since prehistoric times — when they called the ball a stone — we should not be surprised that its game plan was to take over everyday speech.
The word “football” dates back to around 1400, although the Scots banned it for a while in 1424, possibly because the deadly combination of cleats and kilts made injury time drag on for ever.
In 1875, Oxford students coined the slang term “soccer”, a shortening of “Football Association”, presumably because “asso” didn’t catch on. This is useful in the US, where they can tell the difference between two diametrically opposed sports by calling the one with shoulder pads and helmets football, and the other one soccer. In the UK, they mostly call soccer football. In SA, we argue.
Whatever your position on the soccer-football debate, in the coming weeks you will have to call on all your reserves to defend yourself against the barrage of clichés coming down the field.
I’m not just talking about the clichéd behaviour, though there is plenty of that. I’d much rather watch grown men curl up like
SUE DE GROOT hedgehogs and bawl like hadedas when lightly touched by a passing breeze than listen to the nonsensical phrases employed by football commentators.
The website Askmen.com conducted a survey (one assumes they asked men) to find the top 10 most hated football commentary clichés. Number 10 was “end-to- end stuff”, which is when the ball keeps crossing the length of the field, passed from one side to the other, with no goals being scored and not much happening in between. It is boring already, commentators. There’s no need to make it more so with such redundant bilge.
Not everyone employs clichés, of course. Some have distinguished themselves with original phrases that have become immortal for their inanity. After a tough match against Cameroon in the 1990 World Cup, England manager Bobby Robson said: “We didn’t underestimate them. They were just a lot better than we thought.” And when Brazil lost to France in the 1998 World Cup final, Ronaldo mourned: “We lost because we didn’t win.”
If you thought cricket commentators were good at stating the obvious, their big-balled counterparts are way offside. Also on the Askmen list were the dazzling phrases “this game needs a goal” and “it’s a game of two halves”.
Top of the log — perhaps even in a league of its own — was “at the end of the day”. Pedant Class readers have blown the whistle on this odious phrase before, complaining about foul play in the business world. As far as I can gather, “at the end of the day” moved into the boardroom without retiring from the field. I don’t know who moved the goalposts, but it was a game changer.
Hearing “at the end of the day” is particularly annoying when you’re watching a night game, but the phrase has an unlikely defender in Booker-prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro. “I find a lot of what footballers say is poignant and beautiful,” he once said at a literary festival. “I find phrases like ‘to be fair’ and ‘at the end of the day’ very deep. ‘At the end of the day’ is full of stoic ruefulness. It’s very close to reflecting the human condition.”
At this stage in the game, perhaps we should be more tolerant of football and its abuses, both physical and verbal. After all, it’s a marvel to watch.