When I began my career, I read football reports of local league matches to understand them. It was all very well reading the big names, the Glanvilles, the Greens, the McIlvanneys, but they had never covered a match between HAL and CIL, and one felt instinctively that the match should dictate the style, and using the words from a Brazil-Argentina match would be comic.
One word that I came across most often (apart from ‘nippy’, said of inside-forwards as they were known then) was ‘brace’. I knew what it was, of course: it supported weak joints, straightened teeth, was what you did to prepare yourself for something difficult, the curly brackets used in mathematics, suspenders on the trousers I occasionally wore for effect those days. Nowhere did I see it used to mean “two goals.” Except in newspaper reports.
Football, unlike cricket, seemed to lack a vocabulary of its own and appeared content to borrow from others. I suspect some of the overuse is down to the commentary; when you are searching your mind for the apt word, it often tends to settle on a cliche. The World Cup is a good place to test this out. In his delightful book, Football Cliches, Adam Hurrey lists 101 ways to score a goal — from ‘thundering’ the ball in to curling it, slotting it and burying it in the back of the net.
Hurrey asks: Why is football so fond of cliches? It is a game of two halves, possibly the most hackneyed of them all, so much so that, he says, “it became a cliche to denounce it as a cliche.”
There is another nursery for cliches. “The game possesses a surprising number of obsolete words that still flourish here…. most football fans wouldn’t use stalwart, profligate, or the verb form of ‘rifle’ if those words hadn’t been given a new lease of life in their adopted sporting context.”
Around the world, commentators, managers, and former players, with distinguished careers in kicking people below the knee, gather to recycle phrases that have survived longer than many football clubs.
It would be nice to hear a manager say at the World Cup, “No, we don’t take it one game at a time. We will ignore the next six matches and take it again from the seventh.”
Defeats are learning experiences; teams give the mathematically impossible 110 per cent (forcing players to find an additional 10 per cent between the hamstring and the heart).
A team that scores early has “the perfect start.” A team that scores late has “left it late.” A team that fails to score has “rung all the changes but couldn’t find the breakthrough.” Nobody ever simply scores, wins or loses. Football language treats ordinary events as if they were chapters from an epic poem discovered in an archaeological dig.
Cliches survive because football itself thrives on repetition. Meanwhile, let’s brace ourselves for whatever old phrases the World Cup inspires. Who will be the first manager to say, “Phew! That was a game of one half.”?
Published on Jun 20, 2026
