Thrashing and Thumping

I’ve noticed that when four or more goals are scored in a football match against a team, the words ‘thrashed’ or ‘thumped’ are used in report headlines to describe the outcome of the match. For example, Brighton beating Coventry City 5-0, Chelsea beating Bournemouth 5-1, Coventry City beating Newcastle United 4-1, this season. There are many more examples over the years. But there seems to be some limitation to the use of these words in that they are rarely applied if the defeated team gets more than one goal in response. So, ‘thrashed’ or ‘thumped’ are poised to go once the four goal threshold is achieved, but are quickly withdrawn from reports if the opposition manages a couple of goals in reply. In a recent Irish Premier League match between Shelbourne and St Patrick’s Athletic they ‘thrashed’ each other, or perhaps ‘thumped’ one another, in a 4-4 draw. But, of course, as it was a draw the four goals each team scored cancelled 'thrashing' and 'thumping' out.

So, in men’s professional football where you rarely get extremely high scoring games the benchmark for ‘thrashed’ and ‘thumped’ is set quite low. Surely double figures should be the starting point in the modern game?

Personally, I still use Arbroath’s 36-0 win over Bon Accord in September 1885 as the benchmark for a ‘thrashing.’ I’m much too young to have watched it live, but anyone placing a pre-match wager on Bon Accord to nick a 1-0 win would have considered their bet misjudged when the half-time score showed that Bon Accord were losing 15-0! The chances of Bon Accord scoring perhaps ten or more goals and keeping a clean sheet (for non-football people, that’s not conceding any goals) in the second half and thus avoiding being ‘thumped,’ seemed unlikely given their first half defensive performance. 

Of course a savvy punter could have hedged their bets by placing a side wager on Aberdeen Rovers to win against Dundee Harp in another game that same day just down the road. However, the hapless punter would have ended their day sucking on a lone Hamlet cigar when the result of that match came through and they realised Aberdeen had been thrashed 35-0! 

Having seen some old black and white footage of that game, I’m still convinced that if VAR had been invented sooner, at least seventeen of Dundee Harp’s goals would have been ‘chalked off.’ As it was, Aberdeen Rovers did give away several ‘soft’ goals. A draw would have been a more realistic result except for the fact that Rovers failed to score any goals at all. 

Who would have thought that two games on the same day would have had such hefty score lines - 36-0 and 35-0? If any games warranted a ‘thrashed’ or ‘thumped’ description, those two most certainly did.