‘Whenever you write, “the heat was stifling” or “she rummaged through her handbag”, this is dead freight,’ Martin Amis once said. ‘What cliché is,’ he explained, ‘is herd writing, herd thinking and herd feeling.’ Today it appears that Amis’s crusade against cliché was valiant but doomed (is that a cliché?). You’ll find clichés galore in everything from acclaimed polycule novels to alt-lit zines, Substack posts and more. The implication is that there are more important things – confessions, controversy – than style and that originality is for boomers.

But what happens when you take clichés out of the literary realm and into a world where ‘herd feeling’ is the name of the game? In English football, where the thrill lies in watching the same players partaking in the same rituals week after week, clichés become something quite different. They are a way of explaining the game and placing fleeting moments in a wider context. They stop being mere clichés and become a kind of taxonomy.

Adam Hurrey is the subject’s pre-eminent scholar, trying to do for football vernacular what Amis did for literary language. Hurrey’s popular podcast Football Clichés, now produced by Gary Lineker’s company Goalhanger, has reeled in every­one from Jonathan Van-Tam to Jamie Carragher to Sir Keir Starmer to discuss the niches of