Sergio Aguero making himself half a yard for a shot
Like many other facets of British culture, football in this country belongs to a pre-metric era. Alcohol consumed pre-match is measured in pints and speculative efforts on the pitch are measured in yards. Even once you get your head around the pitch being split into yardages rather than metres, there are 0.9144 of the latter in the former, there is the uniquely football term, the half-yard to contend with.
It should be no surprise that a sport in which the 6-yard line and the 18-yard box figure prominently needs a smaller yard-based way to distinguish things that occur. Unlike Fight Club, the main rule when discussing the half-yard would appear to be always talk about the half-yard, however spurious the reference.
The highest space-based compliment one can pay a striker is to say they only need half a yard of space. Whether they are known for creating that half-yard by shifting the ball or finding it with some clever movement is really not important, it’s simply that giving them said half a yard is almost certainly disastrous for your goals against tally.
At the other end of the scale, one of the most common criticisms of struggling teams or individuals is that they look half a yard off the pace. This can frankly mean anything from their opponents beating them to second balls or that their closing down has been dreadful or that simply they’ve been a bit rubbish and are either losing, or ought to be.
The offside rule, and the dubious attempts of officials at enforcing it, are often the most controversial incidents in football matches, and the half-yard is key to analysing them. Strikers can go too early and end up half a yard offside or just lose concentration at which point they tend to drift half a yard beyond the last defender.
So deeply has the half-yard platitude become ingrained within football culture, when Niall Quinn spotted a player drift offside, he was so determined to suggest it might be an issue of half-yards, that he declared the player should’ve looked across the line and stayed a half-yard onside.
Quinn can probably be forgiven for that mistake, you only need to be level rather than behind the last defender, because of the way half-yards are measured in football. Namely that they aren’t.
Any shots that fly just wide are half a yard away from glory, players whose legs have aged lose half a yard of pace and cheeky fullbacks tend to sneak half a yard up the touchline when taking throw-ins.
For the avoidance of any doubt, if you find yourself chatting away about a football match and have nothing else to say, if you spot someone doing virtually anything, comment about the half-yard implications and you’ll fit right in.
