The game has been revolutionised at least three times but no need to drown in pretentious cliche | OneFootball

What is a cliche? Typically it’s a saying that was once fresh and original, but is now so overused as to be virtually meaningless: something that draws the life out of language.

Football is full of cliches.

A manager or player asked to give a pre- or post-match interview can be almost guaranteed to produce a string of cliches, possibly (if it’s certain Premier League managers) interlaced with vitriol, self-justification, and cant, if his team has just lost.

Why do we bother to listen? We could swap the faces and we’d still get the same useless diatribe.

But the worst cliches go beyond the interview and infect the whole game: commentators, so-called or self-styled experts and, sadly, fans, all use them, as if they meant something. Here are some recent ones that I particularly dislike:

1. “We couldn’t get it across the line.” What line? The halfway line, the Siegfried line, the Plimsoll line, the line of least resistance, the line in the sand at the Alamo? Why not just say: “We couldn’t agree the price/terms [or whatever]” or “ They were better than us.” Unfortunately, that would be honesty, and cliches cloud honesty.

2. “He took one for the team”. No, he didn’t; he just wasn’t good enough to stop his opponent without fouling him.

3.”We’re taking it one game at a time”. You mean to say you haven’t looked at the fixture list, or you think you’re already playing next week’s opponents as well as today’s? A cliche tells you nothing, or, even worse, it tells you the bleeding obvious.

4. “It’s like having a new player.” No, it’s not: it’s like having the old one back again, for better or worse. Who are you trying to fool?

5. Numbers that don’t correlate to the player’s squad number. Like all cliches, the speaker thinks they sound good (that’s if it isn’t just an excuse for not thinking at all) even if he doesn’t quite know what it means. When I first started following Newcastle United, it was the shirt that was numbered, not the player. There were no ”squads”, so no squad numbers. There were ten numbers (the goalie didn’t get one) starting with “2” (the right back – the first Newcastle United right back I saw was Dick Keith, by the way) – and going from right to left to number 11 – the outside left (“What’s an outside left, grandad?”) There was no: “He’s a number six but plays like a number eight” (even though his number is actually twenty three). What does it mean? Why do we have to talk like this? If he’s a defensive half back (sorry: defensive midfielder) who occasionally scores goals, why not just say so? It’s so much easier to understand.

OK: I know I’m old fashioned, but in my lifetime the game has been revolutionised at least three times. First, by the Hungarians in the early 50’s; then by the Brazilians at the 1958 World Cup; and again by the brilliant “total football” of the Dutch in the early 70s. But there was never any need to drown these changes in pretentious cliche. We saw innovation, but it was still the same game. Let’s keep it that way.