Cathal Dennehy: Everyone wrote us off - the most annoying phrases in sport
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ON the Monday after the Paris Olympics, following a slew of near misses at medals by Irish competitors in the final days, I wrote in this column that one of the phrases I’d like to see abolished from sport is: You get out of it what you put into it.
That was top of the hit list, but there are others. Lots of them. You’ll undoubtedly have your own too, rolling your eyes every time a player, manager or commentator utters them on TV. And so, digging a little deeper into the sporting lexicon of annoying phrases, here are 10 others I’d like to see outlawed as quickly as possible.
Once a penalty is kicked by an elite male player, it takes about 400 milliseconds to reach the goal – two fifths of a second. And so, waiting to see what way it’s going and then diving is a recipe for failure. Goalies pick their side before the run-up or study the striker’s cues on the approach and make their choice before the ball is kicked. When they choose wrong, commentators love to tell us they “sent the keeper the wrong way.” But do we ever hear of them sending the keeper the right way? Granted, the striker occasionally sells the keeper up the river with his eyes and body positioning but, more often, all that happened was the keeper made a 50-50 choice and simply got it wrong. They weren’t sent anywhere.
Look, we admire the pretence. You’re a really good player from a really good team and you’re about to trample a minnow with your second-string outfit. One of those 5-27 to 0-08 scorelines that makes lads on the wrong side of it wonder why they stayed off the pints of late. We know you’re just ticking a box here. We know the team you’re playing is outmatched. You know it. They know it. But here we are, watching you keep a straight face and sell the beautiful lie: pretending they’re a threat so you don’t give them any motivation to buckle one of your lads when they’re 10 points down after 12 minutes. Stop pretending. We know.
No. X team was not saved by Y upright/post/crossbar/stanchion. The shot was not on target. The dimensions of the goal are fixed. Everyone knows them. Any shot that did not go inside those, which ricocheted off the post, was not aimed correctly. The upright had no active role. It just stood there, motionless. Next time, Mr Commentator, try “saved by the striker’s inaccuracy.”
Many athletics commentators who’ve been in the game for decades apparently still don’t know how the timing system works. And so, when a sprinter crosses the line and the clock stops at, say, 9.82, but is later adjusted to 9.81 or 9.83, they say it’s been rounded up/down. In truth, the first time you see when an athlete crosses the line is an unofficial one, registered when motion is detected on the finishing beam. The official time is deduced from the photo finish, dictated by the first part of an athlete’s torso to cross the line. And so please, commentators, speak the truth: the time was adjusted or made official. It was not rounded up/down.
A disclaimer: my entire rugby career amounted to one training session with Shannon RFC around the age of 10 when, as the littlest pipsqueak on the pitch, who didn’t enjoy being trampled by peers twice my size, I realised this wasn’t for me. Not that, with a Limerick City upbringing, you can ever truly escape its allure. But why is it that in rugby, there’s an endless need to elevate it beyond sport and turn it into an act of war? Bodies are always “on the line”. The players go into battle “in the trenches”, as if clearing out a ruck is on par with defeating the Nazis. But who knows? Maybe it is.
Don’t speak for us all, dear commentator. I, for one, am bored stiff of this match and if I’d anything better to do with my Sunday, then by God I’d be doing it. But here I am, staving off the existential dread and deeply appreciative of an outbreak of mid-game fisticuffs. Is that a selector I see charging on to the pitch? Bring it, my man. Go get some. It might not be popular to admit, but this argy-bargy, dragging-and-punching, squaring-up-to-each-other-like-rhinos-in-the-savannah will 1) greatly entertain me for the next minute; 2) allow me to then play couch juror for the subsequent slow-motion inquest; and 3) vastly enliven the post-game discussion as some chap who threw a retaliatory dig gets blamed for his side’s defeat. Sure, it sets a diabolical example for kids but look, Mr Commentator, I don’t have any, so don’t go tarring us all with the same brush. I do – genuinely – want to see this.
The frequency this phrase is used relative to the frequency a result was determined by who “wanted it more” is – and I don’t think I’m exaggerating here – one of the great travesties of our time. Granted, occasionally the last desperate tackle or lung-bursting run up the wing before a winning score was a function of a team’s desire. But usually when this phrase is uttered, players deny the role of their own talent, skill, preparation and ability to execute under pressure, instead heralding their insatiable hunger as the reason for victory – an underhanded insult at their rivals who, it seems, just didn’t want it enough.
What does this mean? Seriously. It’s a phrase in use far beyond sport, typically rounding out a monologue where someone expresses dissatisfaction. But it’s popping up increasingly in post-game interviews. “We just didn’t perform tonight but look, it is what it is.” Well, what else would it be? Shouldn’t it go without saying that it is – checks notes – what it is? Why did you just waste three seconds of my life? Who are you?
No, you did not. Next.
There are eight billion people on this planet. The number who were aware that X competition was even happening is a tiny fraction of that. Within that subset, the percentage writing off your team was also tiny. Maybe you saw a comment on social media. Maybe a TV pundit or newspaper columnist picked another team to win. But for some reason in sport, especially Gaelic games, that gets hijacked and amplified, like the inverse of homeopathy: multiplied exponentially until it becomes something effective – a distorted reality taking hold in players’ minds that “everyone” wrote them off, even when the bookies had them second favourites throughout the competition, when rival players spoke of how much they respected or feared them. But no. That doesn’t get a man out of bed in the morning. And so here we are with everyone, apparently, having written them off. Everyone.