In the age of social media, everyone’s a critic. And if there’s one thing that critics love, it’s rubbishing the opinions of other critics. The burgeon of casual punditry means that it’s increasingly hard to watch a football match in the pub without hearing a turn-up-trousered bobble hat scoff at the offerings of the on-screen commentators. Football hipsters* hurrah and clink pints of sickly waxy beer whenever they hear that a player has a cultured left foot or earns praise for having good feet for a big man because they think they could do the commentator’s job better. It’s deeply annoying. The football hipster’s sidemouthed remarks and snidey tweets have given football commentators and their quiver of cliches a bad name. I’m here to defend them.
A bold claim to begin the defence: football commentators have a hard job. Bear with me. If you’ve just bussed it back from your fifth consecutive night shift on the paediatric ICU or you’re still coughing up yesterday’s coal dust then granted, your job is indubitably harder. But still, I’m convinced that being a football commentator is a tough gig. And, crucially (to this article at least), that goes some way to explaining why your Tylers and your Tyldesleys use so many cliches in their speech. Let me try to convince you.
Imagine it’s you up there in the freezing commentary box. The first problem you face is that the match below you is not scripted and is happening extremely fast, with violent celerity and bristling muscularity and goals and brawls and bluster and stories and songs that flare up quickly and immediately die away again. Somehow, you’ve got to try and keep up and describe the play, all the while eloquently dispensing piercing insight.
The second problem is that while the game you’re commentating on is unpredictable in the sense that it consists of brand new, present moment passages of play, the randomness of any game is essentially sub-Brownian because it has to conform to the parameters of the sport, which ipso facto means that there can only be mild deviations from the basic formula of run-kick-run-kick-goal. (For video gamers, consider trying to commentate on your game while you waggle your joystick. A football match is more Temple Run than Assassin’s Creed. It’s an enduring and ineffable mystery that football is still able to beguile millions – including me – with such limited scope.)
These two problems present football commentators with a challenging paradox. You’ve got no idea what’s going to happen but you’ve basically seen what is going to happen before, only in slightly different guises. And, more importantly, your viewers have seen all this before too – they’ve been stuffed to the gills with football practically since birth, whether they asked for it or not. It’s your job is to bear all this in mind and somehow keep your super-satiated customer glued to the screen by galvanising the bare steel of the broadcasted action with oh-really stats and peppy shouts and sporty bells and whistles.
The third problem is that quite often the action is not even good or interesting. As well as being simplistic, the physical chaos of a football match can also be a boring, cortex-calcifying goal desert. And if nothing is happening on the pitch below you and it’s not fun to watch any more, your mind is left to wander towards the basic pointlessness of sport and, worse, the nauseating avarice, Onanistic self-regard and offensive martial graveness of sport-as-business. These are dark thoughts that, if vocalised, would quickly yield a P45. They have to be suppressed and shut away until full time.
Faced with all of these challenges – and others not mentioned and more challenging still, such as not umm-ing and ahh-ing and having to please your boss to keep your job and earn your corn – I’d put it to you that you would end up imitating all the other commentators. You’d conform to established norms. You’d inhale deeply from the cliche nebuliser and prep yourself to belch out banalities for 90 minutes or more. It’s the safe choice.
If I’ve persuaded you that football commentary is hard and that its difficulty goes some way to explaining the proliferation of cliches, then please remain seated for one more apology: that football cliches can be helpful and information-rich.
As an example, you’ll hear snarks snigger when a commentator praises a player for having two good feet. But this is not the verbal argon it appears in written form – the initiated know that this isn’t an observation of anatomical orthodoxy, it’s really just shorthand for: “Player X is able to manipulate the ball with near equal adroitness with either foot, which is an altogether useful skill.” Given the time pressures commentators struggle against, it’s understandable that they plump for the more succinct cliche.
I’m not going to exhaustively defend each and every football cliche, but for the purposes of concision, I’ll test the cliches-are-OK-really theory out on the phrase that is most difficult to defend and see if it passes muster. In my opinion, that honour belongs to the phrase he’s almost hit that too well.
There are some clear metaphysical issues with HAHTTW that make it difficult to defend as a sport comment. I’ll try and get them out of the way with a shotgun paragraph of unanswered (perhaps unanswerable) questions:
How can a footballer’s designs be scuppered by having too high a skill level? Surely the apotheosis of a shot is one that enters the net in the top corner? How can anything go beyond that? And how could being better than the best become deleterious to the ends? Should a coach’s response to someone gazumped by their own excessive adroitness be in trying to lower their perception of their own skill, so that when they do hit the ball too well, it’s actually just about good enough without being too good? Would this even be psychologically or biomechanically possible? Could a congress of philosophers, cognitive scientists and football coaches resolve this mind-buster?
Pretty soon though this line of thinking halts, with an igneous clang, at intellectual rock bottom. So where to seek recourse for HAHTTW? It must mean something. After all, football commentators have seen a lot of football. Many of them have played at a high level themselves. If not by academic devotion, then at least by passive osmosis, they must at least understand the game they are watching. And they must at least be trying to relate this understanding to us with their choice of words. But still, how to account for HAHTTW?
As I understand it, a player is consoled with HAHTTW when three mutually dependent conditions are met**:
1 The shot is difficult in nature, either because of defender duress or the starting position of the ball.
2 The shot is clean and respectably speedy.
3 The ball travels not towards the corner of the net, but into the waiting arms of the goalkeeper, who prevents a goal.
Let’s try and use this as a starting point to reverse-engineer some sense into HAHTTW. If a player is dribbling the ball at speed with a defender in close attendance and with only the briefest peripheral glimpse of the goal, they don’t have time to look up and place their shot. They have to make an estimate. Instinct (or, to Kahneman’s disciples, System 1) kicks in here and dictates that players aim for the centre of the goal. Aiming for the centre of the goal gives the player the greatest statistical likelihood of the shot being on target – the thickest slice of the bell curve – and entering the net. Notwithstanding unfortunate deflections, balls that are not travelling towards the goal in the first place cannot result in goals.
As the player winds back his toes like a trebuchet for the strike, two further things dictate where the ball ends up – how good the player’s connection with the ball is and how well that connection marries with the original aim. When one or other of these two factors are not in agreement (perhaps the player failed to master trigonometry), the ball goes more towards the corner of the goal. When the aim and connection are in harmony, the ball goes towards the middle of the goal and is caught by the keeper.
So in my view HAHTTW is really just another way of saying: “Player X’s instinctive aim for the middle of the goal was complemented by an accurate strike of the right part of the foot on the right part of the ball sending the ball towards the centre of the goal and the waiting arms of the goalkeeper.” And as it’s taken me a good long time to describe that, time that is not afforded to the microphone merchants, I actually think that HAHTTW is handy shorthand for the above description.
None of this is to say that commentator cliches aren’t irksome. They absolutely do irk. Try reading Adam Hurrey’s excellent book on the subject in one sitting. But I’d argue that they’re understandable, that they can aid understanding and that they’re part of the bewitching, gaudy fabric of football that millions of us so love. Let’s celebrate them.
* I’ll admit that the half-baked, dilettante pseudo-intellectualism served up above is the signature dish of a hipster ideologue. And yet (because a hipster would never self-identify as a hipster) by calling myself a hipster I also invalidate my hipsterdom. This is what a friend of mine calls the Schroedinger’s hipster paradox.
** Sometimes, it has to be said, HAHTTW is used when a player laces a ball high and wide of the goal. I can’t concoct any defence for this usage, so I’d add a rider to my earlier thesis statement: cliches can be helpful, provided they are used correctly.
Twitter: @jamesgingell1
