Football Language: (to) Shank

To understand the use of ‘to shank’ in football, we should probably start with the noun – a shank. This is an Old English word which refers to the shin bone, the bone running down the front of your leg from the knee to the ankle.  Its first use for sport was actually in golf, and it meant hitting the ball with the base of the golf club, resulting in an inaccurate shot. And that is the meaning that football borrowed. So, if you shank a shot, your shot is inaccurate, and it misses the goal usually because you have hit the ball with your shin, your shank. Let’s have a look at an example from metro.co.uk: “After some neat link-up play, Martial raced through on goal but shanked his shot high and wide, with just Alisson Becker to beat.”

Example

This comment was from Gary Neville and he was disgusted at Martial’s miss. So, to shank a shot is to miss very badly, in an ugly way. You can shank a shot, so the verb shank with the noun ‘shot’, or you can use shank with a preposition, especially ‘wide’ – shank wide. Here’s an example from the BBC: “The former Blackburn winger (Damien Duff ) whose every touch was roundly booed, shanked horribly wide trying to chip the giant Brian Jensen with his right foot.”

There are of course many ways to talk about misses. you can miss a sitter, an extremely easy chance, or miss an open goal – the same. You can slice wide or slice a shot, which means to hit the ball on the wrong side, so it goes away from goal instead of towards goal. One of my favourite is to blaze over, blaze a shot over the bar, which means to hit a powerful shot, but hit the ball high over the crossbar.

Come along to languagecaster.com to find out more about the language of football.

Ta-ra!