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What is a ‘bad day at the office?’ This week’s English for football phrase introduces this cliche. You can understand more about this phrase by reading the transcript below. You can also find many more examples of soccer vocabulary by going to our football cliches page here and our huge football glossary here. This post also features in our podcast show, along with a main report and our weekly predictions.
Bad day at the office
A bad day at the office in football means that a team has had a poor result, or a manager or player has made some big mistakes. Going to work is a regular event, the word ‘office‘ in this cliche refers to work, and a poor day at work means that it wasn’t a day with the usual standard of performance – it was a strangely poor day at work. The phrase is most often used in connection with a team’s performance, so ‘the performance (or it) was a bad a day at the office – It was a bad day at the office. It can also be used with the verb ‘have‘ – to have a bad day at the office, and, less frequently, ‘suffer‘ – to suffer a bad day at the office. Here is an example from the BBC: “Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers admitted his new side suffered “a bad day at the office” as they opened the season with a 3-0 defeat at West Brom. And another from a headline on a Manchester United blog site: “David Moyes’ First Bad Day at the Office. Will Things Improve?”. A bad day at the office.
Check out more football phrases by visiting our huge glossary page, where you can find hundreds of words, phrases and cliches connected to the world of football. If there is a phrase you need explaining send us a comment or email and we will try to explain it for you.
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