This week, languagecaster.com brings you the football phrase ‘chickens come home to roost’. You can understand more about the word or phrase by reading the transcript below. You can also find many more examplesA soccer vocabulary by going to our football cliches page here and our huge football glossary here.
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This week’s English for football is, ‘the chickens come home to roost‘. This expression is used to say that something bad has happened because of mistakes, or bad behaviour, in the past. Someone did something wrong in the past and now trouble has come, or there is a big problem. It is close to the idea of ‘karma‘ in many Asian religions, or the phrase, ‘you reap what you sow‘. When Newcastle United were relegated from the Premier League a couple of years ago many people thought the chickens had come home to roost, that Newcastle’s past mistakes have resulted in their failure. For example, they first hired Sam Allardyce as manager and then soon sacked him, hired Kevin Keegan and forced him to leave, and then subsequently had two more managers during the season. They also bought expensive players with big wages who had little impact on the pitch. Their actions meant that the chickens came home to roost.
