Adam Hurrey - Football Clichés: Decoding the Oddball Phrases, Colorful Gestures, and Unwritten Rules of Soccer Across the Pond

They All Count:
101 Ways to Score a Goal (or Not)

Every Blade of Grass:
Navigating the Modern Football Pitch

For Me, Clive:
The Pundits and Commentators of this World

Aces and Braces:
The Code of Football Reporting

In Fine Voice:
Clichs of Football Fandom

Wheres the Talking?
The Language of Grassroots Football

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First published in Great Britain by Hodder and Stoughton Limited, a member of the Hachette UK Group, 2014

Published in Penguin Books 2015

Copyright 2014 by Adam Hurrey

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ISBN 978-0-698-40927-9

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Adam Hurrey is a London-based football writer. He created the Football Clichs blog in 2007 while working as a TV listings editor and has since contributed articles about the unique language of football to the Web sites of The Guardian (London) and The Telegraph (UK), among others. He also had trials for Swindon Town as a youngster, but was genuinely rejected for being too small.

To Mum, Dad, Ollie and family, Marc, Andy Townsend and the wonderful Luce, without all of whom this book would probably have been written by somebody else.

Its not quite clear exactly when a cold, wet night in Stoke replaced one in Rochdale as the quintessentially English benchmark of footballing aptitude, or when sickly parrots and being beyond the orbit of the moon became so pass as metaphors for failure and glory respectively.

Why is football so fond of a clich? For 150 years, its been somebodys job to relay what happens within the ninety minutes of a match and, as that coverage now reaches saturation point, a reliable formula for succinct description of the sport has become vital.

Clich has a perhaps unhelpfully negative connotation. It implies a lack of original thought, of stifling stereotype, and the language of football can certainly be guilty of both of these. On the other hand, football clichs are a leveller enabling conversation between those relative novices who believe the problem with Arsenal is that they try and walk the ball in and those who feel its a little more complicated than that. Many clichs, in any subject, qualify as such because they are overwhelmingly true. Yes, just before half-time is a good time to score a goal. When isnt it a good time? Well, actually, you can score too early . Words like diminutive , derisory , pulsating and profligate sit with almost absurd comfort in the footballing vernacular, while I struggle to recall anyone using the word aplomb in any other context than a well-taken goal.

Also, the heavy reliance on footballs stock phrases (by players, fans, journalists and broadcasters alike) can often hide their inventiveness. In a century and a half, nothing has encapsulated the unpredictable swings of a football match more succinctly than a game of two halves and yet this eventually grew so hackneyed that it became a clich to denounce it as a clich.

Unsurprisingly, for a game whose traditional appreciation of irony extends to a player scoring against an old club, football has taken a long time to become self-aware. The proverbial good touch for a big man (despite not featuring in any ancient proverb Im aware of) enjoyed an unusually short shelf-life before finally becoming impossible to use without a knowing wink. Commentators increasingly prefix their accepted wisdom with well, its the old clich, isnt it? and players almost apologetically declare that they know its a clich before they insist that they will be taking every game as it comes.

The football clich has become my personal obsession. I find some infuriating, some charming and others waging a perpetual war against logic. At certain points while watching a game, I felt I could predict what was about to come out of the co-commentators mouth, just as he paused to go through his mental filing cabinet to find the appropriate observation. It was this complicated relationship with the instinctive language of the sport that inspired me to start a blog called Football Clichs eight years ago, followed by the Twitter account in 2010 and, finally, this book youre reading now.

It quickly emerged that football clichs were not limited to trite words and hyberbolic metaphors. This was about gestures, mannerisms and patterns of behaviour whose origin sometimes fellow fans, but mostly players and managers was markedly clear. This book, in its unashamedly pedantic way, attempts to document every established piece of body language, every hypertruth, every grammatical oddity and every unwritten rule of football.

Not every clich is indigenous to football but many have been commandeered, butchered and shoehorned into the lexicon because, like James Milner or a strong wall at a free kick, they do a job. Their mindless repetition in a football setting takes them further away from their original context heaven knows what an actual slide rule looks like and this alone makes them worthy of scrutiny. If the word clichs suggests this is a sighing trawl through footballs lazy thought and dull phraseology, well, theres certainly plenty of that. But theres ample room for celebration too. Footballs innate drama lends itself to wonderfully colourful and evocative language, while its on-pitch stresses continue to elicit the purest, most honest displays of emotion from modern players who otherwise occupy themselves with gamesmanship, deception and self-interest.

As the autopilot coverage of football reaches its uncritical mass, it is perhaps right to embrace its idioms and idiosyncrasies and recognise them as a crucial part of the game. The next fourteen chapters will seek to uphold the football clichs that make some sort of sense, dissect the ones that really dont and, ultimately, justify a childhood spent miming along to John Motson and Barry Davies on worn-out VHS goals compilations.

Adam Hurrey, June 2014

1. They All Count: 101 Ways to Score a Goal (or Not)

home

noun

the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household.

adverb

into the goal.

Goalscorers always insist that its the three points that matter most, but their individual achievement remains the most fundamental act in association football. There are surely more words and phrases dedicated to goalscoring attempts, successful or otherwise, than any other aspect of the game.