This post gives explanations of two more footballing clichés. You can find many more examples by going to our football cliché page here.

To run your socks off | Listen to the cliché here

This cliché is used when a team or an individual player is seen to work very hard during a game. The expression is often used with the verb ‘work’ as in he worked his socks off throughout the game. Indeed, this phrase is synonymous with certain types of battling midfield players such as Steven Gerrard or formerly Roy Keane who often run their socks off to get their teams back into a game. If a team works their socks off it means that they battled hard and did not give up. To work your socks off.

A great advert (for the game) | Listen to the cliché here

A great advert for the game is a cliché used by commentators and fans to describe an exciting match that usually represents the best of something or somewhere. Sometimes a match can be described as being a great advert for the Premier League, that is, it represents all that is good from the English league, such as battling skills, bravery, attacking play and so on. When it is used to describe a game from the lower leagues it is praising the standards of the two teams involved – thus, West Brom versus Newcastle was a great advert for the Championship – it was of a Premier League standard despite being played in a lower division.