Talking Soccer in Missouri
Reading reports of soccer matches here in Missouri is as foreign to me as reading reports of American sports.
However with some translation I can get there. Almost.
Here’s a report from a few days back in Jeff City, Missouri where the Lady Crusaders beat the Springfield Catholic Fightin’ Irish.
Thing is they didn’t simply win, they “posted another win by shutout”. A “shutout” in Ireland (and Scotland, Wales, and of course England where we all take our lead from) is a “clean sheet”.
That said, you never “win by clean sheet”, you just “keep a clean sheet”, or you simply “don’t concede a goal”, or if you’re not in the humour for bigger words, you “don’t let in a goal”.
Similarly rather than “Annie Struemph got the shutout in goal”, in Ireland it would be “Annie Struemph kept a clean sheet in goal”, In fact the “in goal” would probably be dropped as it’s well nigh impossible to keep a clean sheet anywhere else.
“Shot on net” would be “shot on goal”. Because as Jack charlton once famously put it, if that ball had crossed the line, it would have been a goal. Yes, a goal is scored once the ball crosses the line, and the net is only referred to should the ball happen to hit the back of it, or if you’re not that good, the side of it - on the outside.
“Gets a lot of assists”. Unfortunately the Americanism of “assist” is creeping more into soccer-talk in Europe, but mostly driven by relatively new statistical need to keep track of Fantasy Football competitions. The term in Europe is “to make a goal”, which is not quite the same as an “assist”.
For example if you beat ten players then pass the ball to a team-mate X two yards away who in turn passes to the goalscorer, you are the one who has made the goal even though you didn’t give the final pass. This is because it’s a subjective concept that calls for a common sense judgement of who truly created the opportunity for the goal to be scored.
Similarly if team-mate X (a good player but not a great player) passes the ball to you, and you have your back to the goal presenting no particular danger to the opposing team, but you feint one direction pretending to take the ball with you and deceive the player marking you so that the ball runs right past you, typically though not necessarily through your legs, and into the path of an unmarked team-mate who then scores, it is you who really made the goal - even though you didn’t even touch the ball. Technically however the unimaginative team-mate X will get credited with the “assist”. This is why American sporting terms and concepts shouldn’t be imported into foreign games.
That act of deliberately ignoring the ball while pretending that you’re not going to, is called a “dummy”. Here’s a clip of the great Pele of Brazil dummying the Uruguayan goalkeeper for his own benefit, therefore making his own goal (not to be confused with an own-goal” - except for the fact that after beating the keeper Pele then missed. And we loved hiim all the more for it.
Meanwhile “Offensive players” means “Attacking players” or “forwards” of course, and “Danielle Baumgartner tallied the score” means “Danielle Baumgartner scored” I think.
“The defense was able to make that tally stand up” means, em, I don’t know, something like “The defence was able to make that goal be enough to win”?
With this win against the Fightin’ Irish, the Lady Crusaders advanced to take on top-seeded Rockwood Summit on Saturday in the semifinals - where they lost.
Meanwhile via Tony’s Kansas City is another sporting word that you’ll remember doesn’t exist in Ireland - “losingest” which in sporting terms, the city of Kansas City makes the top list of.
NOTE: This article has also been published in the Midwest Irish Focus
See Also:
• Talking Temperatures
• Meeting Diego Maradona in Ireland
• Watching Soccer in the USA
• Irish Lose: O Dear, O-dear O-dear O-dear
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