Mark my words: a funny old game

With a steady but unspectacular stream of traffic, Salut! justifies its existence. Elsewhere, a single event can be enough to attract readers in their thousands. So it has been at Salut! Sunderland following the "success" of one team in narrowly escaping relegation at the expense of another, neighbouring team that thought itself too big, too good to fail (the surge shown above reflects just one day's "hits"). I did consider topics other than football for this week's My Word column at The National, Abu Dhabi - but not for too long; oh, and good luck to my daughter Nathalie, who plays for Acton Ladies tomorrow in the only cup final that really matters this weekend ...

In a year with no World Cup or European championships, the end of the normal football season brings, as well as joy and pain to winners and losers, widespread relief. Players and managers depart on summer holidays, long-suffering families reclaim members who devote too much time and money to supporting their teams and the English language is given a break from the battering it receives from August to May.

Even those of us who follow the game with passion accept that we cannot include enrichment of the spoken word among its benefits.

With cheating commonplace and the vilification of referees a matter for growing concern, it may be of little significance that people in football have inadequate powers of expression. But I do grimace when I hear “early doors”, to mean no more than soon after kick-off, or of someone feeling as “sick as a parrot”. At a website for fans of the English club Crystal Palace, a supporter makes the interesting point that the “back of the net” is, in fact, the front of the net. He would probably share my inability to see why it should be the “beauty of the game” that an entirely logical consequence of defeat is to make relegation more likely or honours less so.

Ron Atkinson’s transition from player and manager to pundit has created a bumper collection of gibberish, or “Ronglish” as a site of that name mischievously calls it. This could take up several columns, so I offer only two examples: “He could have done a lot better there, but full marks to the lad” and “if the Cameroons get a goal back here they’re literally gonna catch on fire”. It should surprise no one that Atkinson is also credited with introducing those “early doors”.

But he is hardly a lone culprit. It is so rare to encounter an articulate manager or player that we are astonished when it happens, not least because in many cases English is not even the speaker’s native tongue. The measured eloquence of Arsène Wenger, the French manager of Arsenal for the past 13 years, is so striking that some of us regard his absurdly selective recall of contentious incidents as a fair price for listening to him at all. Another Frenchman, who flourished under his stewardship, has proved a good pupil. Thierry Henry has not only been a great success wherever he has played, he also appears comfortable when interviewed in the language of each host nation.

A third Arsenal connection that springs to mind concerns an Englishman. During the Euro 2000 finals held in Holland and Belgium, I sat in the press box with Alan Smith, who had moved on from a commendable playing career to work impressively as an analyst. One piece of trivia known to attentive students of English football is that Smith is a linguist. Yet he told me he did not feel school certificates in French and German quite justified the description. Perhaps he was being modest. If not, his reputation will have been a symptom of the tendency, when discussing footballers, to elevate respectable but unexceptional educational attributes to serious academic status.

If linguistic inadequacy were the only negative aspect of English football, however, we might be grateful. Hooliganism, now in decline but far from conquered, has naturally been a far greater source of disquiet.

Of course, the average hooligan combines loutishness with poor communication skills. During that same 2000 tournament, I heard England supporters explaining appalling behaviour with the mantra: “We was provoked.”

Without commenting on the wayward grammar, a police intelligence official noted: “To them, provocation may be no more than a person speaking his own language in his own country.”

Comments

[Bill Taylor]

"The average hooligan combines loutishness with poor communication skills." One need look no farther than the silver (or should it be fool's gold?) tongue of Joe Kinnear, a shining example to the benighted foot soldiers of the Toon Army. That, of course, is off the f****** record.

[Keith]

Footballers, like children, should be seen and not heard. They should be made to follow the inestimable example of the great Paul Scholes, who gives interviews with the frequency of the appearance of Halley's Comet. Media outlets, of course, are to blame because not only do they hang on to every inarticulate word of players and ex-players, but quite often employ them as summerisers and columnists, thus propagating their butchery of the language. Why? I doubt anyone would pay to watch Colin's dazzling skills on the wing (or, more likely, substitute's bench), so we shouldn't have to pay to listen to ex-footballers fail to string two sentences together.

[Colinrandall1@gmail.com]

I wouldn't even have been much use to Nathalie, Keith. Her team lost 1-0 but they were not, apparently, outplayed to quite the same degree as Man United v Barcelona.

[Keith]

Ouch. Still, there's always next year. Just hope United can avoid Sunderland in the group phase