10) A whisker
The whisker has gradually edged out the “lick of paint” as the standard unit of measurement for an attempt at goal which flies narrowly wide of the post.
Pedants will point out that such shots are still at least half the width of the woodwork away from going in, but the whisker is all about the sheer agony of missing the target at the crucial moments.
9) Miles offside
Just how offside a player is really is in the eyes of the beholder: one man’s “just strayed offside” is another man’s “miles off”.
For any opposition defender - usually when they’re arguing with the poor linesman - the standard unit of measurement in these circumstances is “F***ING MILES OFF”. If it’s a particularly tight decision, one single “F***ING MILE OFF” is acceptable.
8) “A yard either side”
A useful unit of measurement in the art of stating the bleeding obvious, when a header (or, perhaps, a shot that, if anything Clive, has been hit almost too well) lands in the grateful hands of the goalkeeper on his line.
“A yard either side…” our co-commentator suggests, “....”
Actually, that’s it. We’re left to imagine the rest of the Sliding Doors scenario ourselves.
7) Fully 50 yards
Oddly, one of the most frowned-upon acts in football is to get involved in a melée on the other side of the pitch, as if it’s somehow out of your jurisdiction. Anyway, to do so, a player must run “fully 50 yards to get involved”. Pundits never measure this precisely, it’s always “50 yards” and it’s always, for some reason, “fully”.
6) All of 35 yards
A distant cousin of “fully 50 yards”, but with a rather more wholesome purpose. Pundits have a tendency to overestimate the distance of a long-range goal (sometimes adding on five yards to their original guess), even when the patterns of immaculate modern pitches provide a perfect guide.
Anyway, any screamer that flies in from between 30-40 yards out can be said to have been scored from “all of” that distance.
5) Acres
Classic, mild footballing hyperbole. The important point here is that a footballer can never be in one, single acre of space.
Being in “acres of space” doesn’t guarantee you’ll get the ball, no matter 1) how frantically you wave your arms or 2) just how absolutely postal you go when the attack breaks down. If you do receive the pass, you’re no longer in acres of space but are simply awarded “the freedom of [Stadium X]” to do as you wish.
4) Oceans
Another measurement for excessive gaps on a football pitch, but must crucially be differentiated from “acres”.
Where a player can find himself in acres of space during an attack, it’s only across a whole game that he (or indeed a whole team) can enjoy “oceans of space”. Simple really, and now you know.
3) All the time in the world
Some mild exaggeration is a constant feature of footballing measurements, and this represents the peak.
If a player finds himself in sufficient space in the box - more than half a yard, certainly - he should have “all the time in the world” to “pick his spot” and score. To put it into stark perspective, all the time in the world is estimated to be 4.543 billion years. That is some seriously slack man-marking.
2) Bags
Once it has been determined that a player does, indeed, have that “half-a-yard” of pace, it is mandatory to measure the rest of his pace in bags.
Bags of pace may or may not weigh the same as “bags of talent”, but both are considerably heavier than a single “bag of tricks”.
1) Half a yard
Thanks, in part, to British football’s enduring refusal to even countenance the metric system*, the versatile concept of the half-yard continues to flourish. Most commonly, half a yard is all that the elite striker needs to be given in the box in order to take his proverbial mile.
Otherwise half a yard can be a cruel shortfall: a player (even if he’s “no slouch”) might “just lack that half a yard of pace” or, even worse, have injury rob him of that all-important half-yard.
*With the obvious exception of the late, great Graham Taylor who made sure - at all times, even when the going got seriously tough - that he was a metre.
