You may remember, a few months ago, Theo Walcott brought the discourse of Football Cliche into the real world quite spectacularly:
It's been a long process, we've had the baby now, so hopefully we can move on as a family.
Short of congratulating the midwife on the quality of her delivery, that is pretty outstanding work by Theo: proof that the humble Football Cliche can be applied to pretty much anything in the real world.
While Theo was widely derided for bringing his boring, post-match media training to the birth of his baby boy, he is not the first footballer to have the birth of a child bear the indelible mark of a cliche of the sport.
Writing in today's London Times, Tony Cascarino offered some advice to Harry Kane, who scored a hat-trick against West Brom in Saturday days after becoming a father.
What followed is one of our favourite Irish footballing anecdotes in some time. Here it is:
When Harry Kane scored a hat-trick on Saturday, a few days after becoming a father, it rminded me of when my first wife Sarah was pregnant with our first child and Milwall had a game. She told me to go and play. Before the match, I was in the car park signing autographs at the old Den.
I played and found out after that my son Michael had been born. I rushed to the hospital but stopped on the way to buy a congratulations card. I gave it to her and she threw it back at me from her hospital bed. I'd written, 'Best wishes, Tony Cascarino'.
I was on autopilot from signing autographs and for some reason I did the same for Sarah. I'll never live it down.
Outstanding!
The story forms part of Cascarino's column with the paper today, and we can only assume that Kane didn't repeat Cascarino's error...can't we?
