In this football language post we look at the headline, ‘All at sixes and sevens‘ from the Daily Mirror football page from October 5th 2020 which describes two high-scoring games from the Premier League this weekend. You can see more explanations of newspaper headlines here and don’t forget we have hundreds more explanations of football language in our football glossary. If you have questions or comments about this or any other phrase then email us at: admin@languagecaster.com.Newspaper Headline: All at sixes and sevens
This headline, ‘All at sixes and sevens‘ is taken from the Daily Mirror’s sport pages (October 5th 2020; via The Week and refers to two of the big games from the weekend which saw Manchester United and Liverpool fall to heavy defeats. The headline uses a well known phrase ‘to be at sixes and sevens‘ which means that someone or something is in a mess, is completely disorganised or is all over the place. We sometimes use this phrase in football to describe a poorly organised team (especially the defence) which would mean that the opposition had been given lots of opportunities or chances to score. This happened in two of the big games from the weekend when Tottenham thrashed Manchester United 6-1 and Aston Villa hammered the Premier League champions Liverpool.
The headline shows a picture of two celebrating Tottenham players on the left and two Aston Villa players on the right also celebrating. Then in the middle of the pictures is the headline ‘All at sixes and sevens‘ which refers to the fact that Tottenham scored scored six and Aston Vila scored seven goals against the disorganised defences of Manchester United and Liverpool respectively. It is a clever take on the phrase but of course the two teams that were actually at sixes and sevens were Manchester United and Liverpool.
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