How to speak the language of football

In this excerpt from his book, Football Clichés, Adam Hurrey translates the bewildering dialect employed by sports journalists. Read it with aplomb

By Adam Hurrey for Football Clichés, part of the Guardian Sport Network

Football has developed a voracious appetite for stealing, commandeering and recycling phrases from elsewhere for its own (invariably clumsy) purposes. The game possesses a surprising number of obsolete words that originated elsewhere but still flourish here. It doesn’t require much sticking out of the neck to suggest that most football fans wouldn’t use stalwart, profligate, adjudged, diminutive or the verbal form of rifle if those words hadn’t been given a new lease of life in their adopted sporting context. Nor would they ever describe something being done with aplomb, while only the engineers among us could identify a real-life slide rule.

While breathless broadcasting is responsible for the more questionable and ham-fisted football clichés, the printed word is where the more refined part of the football vernacular has slowly been allowed to mature over generations. Millions of match reports have had to find a variety of ways to describe goals, horror tackles and emphatic victories. However, just as a co-commentator must hurriedly cobble together a coherent sentence, newspaper editors have to work within strict limits on their back pages. Economy of space has promoted the use of certain words that are ubiquitous in tabloid headlines in particular, but which you could never say out loud with a straight face (unless you’re a Sky Sports News presenter).

Footballers love to be in the headlines, unless it’s for all the wrong reasons. In an era when pretty much anything players do, on or off the pitch, is liable to be shoehorned into a red-top or internet headline, the football media has developed a set of space-saving keywords (mostly of no more than three to five letters) that account for any incident:

 

Ace

Where better to start than with the ace? Despite its elite connotations, aceness is a conveniently fluid concept in the world of newspaper headlines. Premier League youth-teamers convicted of driving offences or League Two players caught in compromising situations in hotels qualify as aces on the basis of sensationalism alone, to the point where using the word to describe those genuinely at the pinnacle of the game seems woefully insufficient.

Axe

The most excruciating wait to be put out of one’s misery is when a beleaguered manager (or boss, for these purposes) faces the axe. In the interests of pedantry, it should be emphasised that managers are never ultimately hit by the axe, they are simply axed. It can also be used to describe players being dropped from the squad – not only are they axed, but they are also frozen out. It’s a cruel world.

Bid

Normally associated with proposed transfer deals, bid can also appear as a synonym for a team’s efforts to achieve a season-long goal (such as the league title), but without quite the focused determination of a vow.

Blast

A vitriolic burst of criticism, with various possible sources or targets – often a poor, defenceless referee.

Blow

A disappointing event, invariably associated with injuries. The hammer blow, however, is exclusive to title bids.

Boost

The polar opposite of a blow.

Coy

“Tight-lipped” managers remain coy when asked about new signings – talking about players at other clubs (like talking about referees) is something managers go out of their way to say they don’t do while still actually doing it anyway.

Dent

A type of blow, but one that only affects a bid or someone’s hopes and rarely terminal (unlike, say, a hammer blow or a derailing).

Eye

Eyeing is the more voyeuristic equivalent of keeping tabs on a player, before mulling over a bid.

Exit

The departure from a cup competition. If the circumstances are calamitous enough, clubs can also crash out of a cup, or even be unceremoniously dumped out. Any of which may usher their manager towards the exit door.

Faces

After a controversial incident, but before its punishment is meted out, the accused player or club (or soon-to-be-axed manager) will be held in the purgatory of simply facing their fate.

Hails

 Bruce

 Steve Bruce, in 1985, holding up a report in which he his hailed. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Getty Images

Victorious managers feel compelled to hail a collective or individual performance, or the vocal support of the (no doubt magnificent) fans.

Held

Form-book defying stalemates usually involve a frustrated side being held. Sufficiently vague for use with any type of draw, regardless of who scored first or if it was a 0-0 stalemate.

Hit

After facing an FA probe and taking the subsequent rap, the miscreant can then be hit with a fine (or, indeed, slapped with a ban). Also used as shorthand for impressive goalscoring feats (‘Ronaldo hits four in Real rout’) or specifically sized capitulations (‘Droylsden hit for six’).

Jibe

The traditionally sneaky opening move in a bout of mind games, which can escalate to a war of words.

Joy

Exploiting its diminutive stature to the full, joy is the weapon of choice to describe a manager’s/player’s happiness.

Probe

The expected preliminary investigations of the FA (or, in more extreme cases, the police) which are invariably faced before they are launched.

Raid

The act of managers returning to recent former employers to cherry-pick their favourite players, ideally in one single deal. Suggests a certain cynicism from the bidding club, and a level of helplessness on the part of the seller.

Rap

A cult favourite, this diminutive word is far catchier than ‘disciplinary proceedings’. An FA probe inevitably leads to an FA rap, two headline-friendly terms that cannot help but conjure up images rather different to their intended meaning. Such disciplinary proceedings attempt to bring closure to an ongoing row of some sort, be it a mere war of words or a full-blown, I’d-rather-be-punched-in-the-face spit-spat. Even the most serious issues such as race rows are effectively trivialised for the purposes of alliteration.

Seal

The rubber-stamping of a transfer deal (protracted or otherwise) or the relatively untroubled progression of a club to the next round of a cup competition.

Set for

Similar to facing something, but without the ominous threat, clubs tend to be set for cup draws, while players patiently find themselves set for a move elsewhere.

Sorry

The equivalent of beleaguered for clubs who have capitulated and been very heavily defeated.

Stun

Late or unexpected winning goals have the tendency to stun, particularly if Goliath ever faces a tricky trip to face David in the FA Cup.

Switch

A swiftly completed move, unfettered by any prolonged haggling or red tape.

Swoop

Similar to a raid, if rather less exciting and more smoothly completed, it again refers to a bigger club signing a player from a smaller club. These can often be bulk purchases, neatly described as double or triple swoops.

Vow

Nobody in football promises to do anything, they always vow – silencing the boo-boys is a common vow, as is a player’s repaying of a manager’s faith.

Emphatic scorelines also lend themselves to catchy headlines involving vaguely familiar phrases of unclear origin. The fun begins at around the four-goal mark, with a handy hotel-rating analogy:

Four goals = FOUR-STAR 

Five goals = FIVE-STAR

Six goals = JOY OF SIX/HIT FOR SIX/SIX OF THE BEST

Seven goals = SEVENTH HEAVEN/SEVEN-UP

Eight goals = (no cliché allocated, although GR-8 is making a spirited, if clumsy, attempt to establish itself in recent seasons)

Nine goals = CLOUD NINE

Naturally, we all want to know who the protagonists are in the latest football pantomime, so desperate red-top headline writers can be seen to resort to painful, puzzling abbreviations such as MOU, WENG or the punned-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life ROO. You won’t have to look too hard in tomorrow’s papers to find these three- and four-letter codewords and, once you’ve started spotting them, the more ridiculous they will start to look. Unless the FA’s disciplinary panel really are spitting sick rhymes from an orbiting space module.

Elsewhere, football’s surprisingly subtle relationship with grammar bears curious fruit. While the animal world enjoys an innumerable complement of collective nouns, ranging from the wonderfully alliterative to the impenetrably obscure, you may not be surprised to learn that football has quite a few of its own. For reasons of sensationalism, laziness, inaccuracy or simply diversity, football coverage has demanded that a selection of collective nouns be made available, to be drawn from whenever appropriate. The list covers all aspects of the game and leaves us in no doubt (despite the lack of cold, hard numbers) of how one should pluralise the subjects in question:

Raft of substitutions

The sole domain of largely meaningless international friendlies, where the second half becomes fragmented by the experimentation of both coaches as they seek to give debuts to their one-cap wonders. Such games have a tendency to peter out until someone finally, inevitably, asks: “What have we learned?”

Host of opportunities

Hosts tend to be fairly undesirable collections of missed opportunities or absentees from the first team.

String of chances

Chances may arrive in strings, as can a goalkeeper’s saves or a player’s impressive performances. Deviating slightly from the grammatical theme, teams will also aim to string some wins together or, at the very least, two or three passes.

Brace

A pair of goals for a player in one game, although simply the word brace alone is now sufficient, as nothing else football-related arrives in that form. Braces can be quickfire in nature, but leave the goalscorer vulnerable to be substituted before he can complete his hat-trick.

Flurry of yellow cards

Card-happy referees can sometimes end a barren first half-hour or so by unleashing a flurry of yellow cards in quick succession. They will seek to justify this sudden outburst of disciplinarianism by pointing out various areas of the pitch to bemused perpetrators of persistent fouling.

Hatful of chances

A more flamboyant exaggeration, used to ridicule the striker that has missed these chances, some of which may have been gilt-edged. This represents one of the more imprecise units of measurement in football, as there seems to be no official confirmation of the volume of an average hat. Confusingly, though, while the misfiring hitman can fill a hat with squandered opportunities, he can also successfully score a hatful. Or, indeed, fill his boots.

Run of victories

Similar to a string of wins, but tends to be more smoothly and less desperately put together and, therefore, more suited to a march towards the title rather than a Great Escape from relegation.

Array of talent

Most commonly found at major tournaments or on expensively assembled substitute benches, but can also arrive on a club’s youthful conveyor belt. The elite clubs, however, often boast a galaxy of stars.

Mass of bodies

Generally located somewhere in the midst of an almighty penalty-area scramble, a mass of bodies can be the reason for a statuesque goalkeeper being unsighted as a strike from all of 30 yards flies through a forest of legs and into the net. Elsewhere on the pitch, high-pressing teams coordinate their considerable efforts to form a swarm of [insert colour here] shirts to win back precious possession.

Embarrassment of riches

To further emphasise the options a manager has at his disposal, the international caps and transfer fees of his substitutes are gleefully totted up to illustrate his embarrassment of riches, often (rather aptly) while they are being humbled by a side who were assembled for the price of a four-bedroom house.

Glut of goals

A goal glut can occur in a specific competition, particularly a weekend of league fixtures in a single division. We will be excitedly told how many goals flew in during the 10 or so matches, leaving us to do the maths ourselves to decide if that is actually impressive or not.

Catalogue of errors

The helpful football media dutifully compile these to shame hapless individual players at a later date. Alternatively, unfortunate players may wish to browse their catalogue of injuries after they’ve been forced to hang up their boots. It’s not just disappointments that are figuratively documented, though – scorers of great goals invariably have a scrapbook to keep them in.

Series of high-profile gaffes

A more focused and specific offshoot of the catalogue of errors, a series of high-profile gaffes tends to be more easily attributed to goalkeepers. The series of high-profile gaffes becomes so because Sky Sports News insist on endlessly looping footage of its contents.

Football Clichés by Adam Hurrey is now available in paperback