By Cosmo Adair
To idealise: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart. (Martin Amis)
There’s a mobile-game called New Star Soccer in which you’re a ludicrously gifted footballer – the sort for whom ninety goals-a-season constitutes a meagre return. As well as the more obvious gameplay (football), you encounter a sequence of in-game choices. Should you cheat on your girlfriend? Or go to the casino with your teammates? Or buy a sports car? You face all the no-win quandaries of a thick and morally bereft noughties footballer.
Tough as being an adulterous spendthrift with a celestial right foot might be, it’s light work compared to dealing with the press. For post match interviews, several boxes appear on the screen, containing trivial if absurdly meaningless quotes. The boxes flash quickly in a sequence. In spite of how sheerly unmemorable the phrases are, you have to remember the order before tapping it into the phone. It comes out with, say, ‘Over the moon, y’know, great feet for the big lad, um, game of two halves,’ after which the press will be delighted. But if you mix up ‘y’know’ and ‘um’, for instance, then the Fourth Estate will come for your head. It’s deliberately comic, whilst not unrepresentative of most football-speak, the language in which a person with as quick and sybaritic a lifestyle as Kyle Walker comes across as impossibly dull. Not all the dullness is in the tone; in fact, most of it’s in the language. Football-speak is cliché, whether that’s the monotone reflections of the above, or else the cringe-makingly brilliant commentarial flights of Peter Drury which, for all their purported originality, still brim with cliché. Football-speak is inseparable from cliché. I think that is why we are so fond of it.
I had planned to write this in the snottier voice of one who abhors the debased language with which the mobs discuss their footy-ball. But after the most basic preliminary research, I encountered that ‘Football Clichés’ are a well-trodden topic of discussion. There is a book, a blog, a podcast, and even an article in The Guardian—all by the same man, Adam Hurrey, a writer at The Athletic.
In his book Football Clichés, Hurrey finds them endearing. They have ‘unhelpfully negative connotations,’ given ‘[they imply] a lack of original thought, of stifling stereotype.’ He acknowledges that football-speak can be guilty of this at times. But, ‘For 150 years, it’s been somebody’s job to relay what happens within the ninety minutes of a match and, as that coverage now reaches saturation points, a reliable formula for succinct description of the sport has become vital.’ So, they become a cipher through which fans, players, managers and commentators can speak. According to Hurrey’s helpful definitions, ‘The ball is in the net’ means it’s ‘Not strictly a miss, but if ‘the ball is in the net’ there’s a fair chance the goal has, in fact, been disallowed.’ Or else, a ‘Host of opportunities’: ‘Hosts tend to be fairly undesirable collections of missed opportunities or absentees from the first team.’ Hackneyed phrases are instead condensed, efficacious means of communication.
But Martin Amis makes the opposite point. More generally, clichés are ‘dead words’; they lack ‘freshness, energy and reverberation of voice.’ A cliché undermines our capacity for sincere thought and feeling. This is true. If you doubt me, you need only call to mind ‘Take Back Control,’ ‘Get Brexit Done,’ or ‘Make America Great Again,’ which testify to the hypnotic effects of sterile language. Those phrases attest to how, in losing freshness, cliché becomes ‘herd writing, herd thinking and herd feeling’. Hurrey says something similar; only, he gives it a positive spin. In football, clichés act as a ‘leveller—enabling conversation between those relative novices who believe the problem with Arsenal is that they try and walk the ball in and those who feel it’s a little more complicated than that.’ In a sense, then, it’s a kind of esperanto—a simplistic, classless language with which the herd can low.
If you’re unsure of how to use ‘the herd instinct’ in a sentence, the Cambridge Dictionary gives the example of ‘In large crowds, such as at a football match, the herd instinct often kicks in.’ Cliché is the language of the herd and, for better or for worse, football is a herd sport (playing it, watching it, talking about it). The worst moments of following football are bound up with the herd (mid-morning drunkenness, beating-up the French or anyone for that matter), but so too are the positive ones. In the subjugation of self to the crowd, in the Dionysian loss of identity, you become a part of an intoxicatingly cohesive, classless whole, which doesn’t care who you are but rather who you support.
Reviewing a book on Hooliganism in the 80s, Amis described how its author ‘wrote the book because he liked it, too. He liked the crowd, and the power, and the loss of self.’ To succumb to a crowd, you must shed the uniqueness of your language and your personality, which cliché enables you to do. So, whilst clichés are no less crass when they’re referring to football, they’re somehow less immediately negative. The herd, in football, is more ambivalent—neither good nor bad. Cliché is the same. To idealise: football is cliché.