What I learned from the language of football

December 9, 2007 · by Joanna Paterson · in

I thought this month’s writing challenge “what I learned from the world of sports” was going to leave me stumped.  I do not take, nor have I ever taken, an active role in the world of sports.  PE, sports days, compulsory games at school were all of a form of torture to me, a world I was happy to leave behind when I reached adulthood, and have never sought to re-enter.

But then I remembered that I do have a continuing fascination with watching, following and listening to the most beautiful of all games: football.  And as I thought about this some more I realised that it’s not just the game itself that I love, it’s the language that it’s wrapped in: the words, the expressions, the mangled metaphors and tired old clichés that are as much a part of the game as the referee’s whistle.

As time goes by I catch myself listening to football as much as watching it.  Not just the match commentary on the radio but the pre-match warm up, the post-match interviews, the phone-ins with fans – irate, frustrated, ecstatic, bitter, laughing, incoherent, witty.  I find myself smiling as I listen to the results being read out, not so much at the scores but the incantation of the team names, words from a bygone era, conjuring up not just memories from my own childhood but an imagined (and yes, clichéd) world of my grandfather’s time, pushing his way through a huge crowd of men in flat caps with thin, pinched faces, surging through the gas-lit, smog-filled streets of pre-war London.

And although we all love to scream and shout at the nonsense mouthed by the TV commentators, the studio pundits, the players and managers – their garbled sentences, the clichés, the platitudes – the world of this particular sport would be diminished without the words, the language, the narrative that goes with it.

Because at some level we know that the clichés and platitudes contain an inexorable truth, not just about the game but the bigger pitch of life.  They provide us with a means to talk about the ups and downs, the defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, the triumph and the despair.  Although it’s a most physical game you cannot talk about football without reference to passion, attitude, confidence, belief, spirit.  Words that are missing from other narratives – about politics, or business, or life.

And it provides us with a framework for making sense of the ups and downs of our world.  Clichéd or no, there are always times when we need to hold on to these most fundamental of lessons.

That it is a game of two halves.  That it is, indeed, a funny old game.  That surprises will happen along the way, leaving you muttering that you just couldn’t write this script.  That you need to take each game as it comes.  But that at the end of the day, whatever the end result, if you play well you can walk away with your head held high.