The life of a clichéd football term is easily trackable.
It starts with an off-the-cuff comment from a pundit somewhere, and other pundits watching like the sound of it, and adopt it as something that is said whenever something vaguely similar to the first instance pops up. The more pundits say it, people start to get pissed off by it, and then it becomes an ironic joke, before finally, it dies.
The best example of this is "Yeah, Messi is great, but could he do it on a wet and windy Tuesday night away to Stoke?"... It started as a genuine question as a young player who looked slight physically, then it started popping up more and more before the internet made it into a meme and killed it.
The following cliché is not yet at ironic-joke stage, but is very, very close, so we all need to collectively give it a push so it will die off soon, because it's complete and utter bullshit. We're talking about any variation of:
If [Insert good striker/attacker here] scored that, we'd be talking about it for weeks!
Jermaine Jenas is not by any means the only pundit to utter the words, but as he is the most recent example and chose the extremely visible platform of MOTD 2 to use it, he'll be getting some stick here.
If Harry Kane puts that in the back of the net, we're going crazy about that!
He then immediately follows those words with:
The touch, and the finish, within a yard of space, and how quick he's done it, strikers [turns to Troy Deeney]... You're proud of those aren't you?
We would be going crazy, now lets go crazy.
Defenders are footballers too, and if anything, them scoring a spectacular goal results in more discussion of the goal for weeks to come. How has this cliché become a thing?
If Lionel Messi scored the goal Steve Cook did on Sunday, nobody would give a shit, because he's scored roughly 40 like it since 2013. The fact that it is Steve Cook, and not Harry Kane, makes it noteworthy... Which makes it a point of discussion... Which is why it is baffling to claim that not enough of a deal is being made.
Stop it, pundits. Please.
