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[Faustino]

A friend of mine found this article, I thought it might make a good read for those of us who like a bit of footy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,803391,00.html



Present far from perfect

David McKie
Thursday October 3, 2002
The Guardian

The match in which Manchester United beat Bayer Leverkusen a week ago was marked by a curious incident in which the fourth official, who appeared to have been watching a TV replay, had a word with the referee, who then booked United's defender Rio Ferdinand. At half-time, the Radio 5 presenter asked Trevor Brooking to explain what had happened. "The player has collapsed," Brooking told her. "The referee has gone up there ... he has gone all the way back, right the way to the halfway line. He has come back and shown the yellow card to Rio Ferdinand."

No doubt some of his audience asked themselves at this point: what warrant does this fellow have for talking this way? The incident had happened some minutes before. It was history. Why, therefore, did he not simply say: "The player collapsed. The referee went all the way back ... he showed the yellow card to Ferdinand"? The booking will soon be forgotten, but a deeper question remains. Does this practice, so common in football commentary nowadays, have any grammatical justification?

I turned for guidance to English Grammar in Use, by Raymond Murphy, defined as "a self-study reference and practice book for intermediate students" and published by Cambridge University Press. This confirms that the tense Brooking employed is the present perfect - as opposed to the past perfect, the one which gives you "had" rather than "has".

The rules laid out here make no specific exceptions for football commentary, but I guess you could just about stretch them to justify Brooking's usage. "When we use the present perfect there is always a connection with now." Ferdinand's booking clearly had a connection with now since, had he collected another during the second half, he would have been off. "The action in the past has a result now." Well, not quite a result, but at least a half-time score. "We often use the present perfect to give new information or to announce a recent happening": well, of course. Take the news. Someone coming hotfoot from the conference floor doesn't say: "Tony Blair told them he doesn't give a stuff what they feel about PFI." The formula is: "Blair has told them" to go and jump off the pier.

And yet the usage in football still seems awkward and odd. It doesn't happen with cricket. When the tea interval comes, they treat the events of the previous session as history. "England collapsed," they tell us. "The middle order made only 10 runs between them"; adding, if they are Henry Blofeld, that a perfectly lovely bus came down the St John's Wood road just as Flintoff was out.

It's even odder when the present perfect is still being used once a game is entirely over. "Tell us about your goal," an interviewer will wheedle a goalscorer. "Well," the hero will say, "it was, like, Briggsy has swung the ball over, and Smiggsy has, like, you know, toe-poked it on, and I've been lucky enough to, sort of, drill it past the keeper with a shot of such awesome power and majesty that no keeper in Europe could have stopped it."

It seems even more incongruous when you come across it a whole week later, as you do these days at every level of football. Here, for instance, is Tommy Saunders, manager of Chippenham FC of the Dr Marten's Premier League, reported in the Wiltshire Gazette & Herald, several days after the Bluebirds succumbed 3-1 to soaraway Newport County. "We've missed absolute sitters ... Mark Badman has kicked it straight at the goalie from five yards. Our luck was [should not this be: 'has been'?] summed up in the last minute when Steve Brown has put in an absolute pearler of a cross to Charlie Griffin and, from four yards, he has managed not to put it in the net."

I think what is happening here is that Brooking and Saunders are reliving events so deeply stamped on their consciousness that they seem to be happening still. The tense involved here deserves a name of its own: the "re-enactment perfect", perhaps. What worries me is that the practice may spread. The new breed of telly-dons, in their desperation to make the battle of Marston Moor less boring to teens and twenty-somethings, will adopt the re-enactment tense to add urgency to their accounts of distant events as dramatised behind them by Sealed Knot activists clanking away at each other in swirling mist.

Where Gibbon writes: "The protection of the Rhaetian frontier, and the persecution of the Catholic church, detained Constantius in Italy above 18 months after the departure of Julian", his successors may very well say these events " have kept Constantius kicking about for easily a year and a half after Julian's packed it in". They may even say "Jules"; you can never be sure nowadays.