Minding my own business washing the dishes and then I heard this on BBC Radio 5 Live | OneFootball

I often find myself washing dishes in the kitchen alone, well apart from the Whippet, my trusty companion who never lets me down. What also keeps me ‘company’ in those moments of solitude is BBC Radio 5 Live on the radio.

Most of what I hear coming across the airwaves I often struggle to recall.

That said, I do remember being extremely hacked off about the breakfast presenter, Rick Edwards, the morning after Kieran Trippier had slipped, allowing Chelsea’s Mykhailo Mudryk to equalise in last season’s League Cup quarter-final.

Edwards had crassly taken an over the top rise out of Wor Kieran and was being hugely disrespectful towards a man that had been the catalyst for our great escapology act in the 2021/22 season (plus for that wider national radio audience, an England regular over many years).

Whatever we might think about Trippier’s ability to hold down a first-team place right now, our captain at the time deserved better. I thought the BBC was meant to be impartial after all and I was so incensed, I wrote about it in The Mag (read HERE).

Anyway, I have continued to listen to BBC Radio 5 Live despite my hissy fit in the run-up to last Christmas.

Recently, I was doing the dishes and listening in on the radio, when something completely took the biscuit, to the point where I really couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

The frequent use of words like transition, second phase, recycle and low-block all spring to mind, as I listened to the match commentator/summariser.

That got me thinking.

At what point did this lexicon of words become a feature of the modern game and perhaps more pertinently, what on earth do these phrases actually mean?

Take ‘transition’.

The dictionary defines this word as being ‘the process or a period of changing from one state or condition to another’. And this actually happens on a football field? Apparently, what the commentator/summariser meant, was that one team had just won possession of the ball from the other.

‘Second phase’ is similar.

Say for example, a corner is headed clear. The second phase begins when the attacking team regains possession. Apparently, the defending team must also recognise that the second phase has also begun, otherwise they’ll be in danger of conceding. Give me strength!

‘Recycling’ is something I used to be really bad at…

Until the Council supplied those different coloured bins that is.

When they were talking about recycling on BBC Radio 5 Live, they didn’t mean putting an empty bottle of Jack Daniels in the dark blue bin. What they actually meant, was that the team in possession had turned away from its opponent and had passed the ball across the field, with the intention of creating an attack in a different part of the pitch.

Finally, ‘low-block’.

This is defined as ‘a defensive strategy where a team moves back and forms a compact shape near their goal’.

This is AKA ‘parking the bus’, although it must be said that even that phrase itself is a relatively new one and I believe we have Jose Mourinho to thank for that.

I grew up in an era when there were relatively few football commentators and there were no summarisers.