‘Talk is cheap so, let’s hope the penny drops.’ Harry Redknapp
We’ve visited the utterances of those involved in football before on this blog but when I heard this on the radio a few months ago it got my mind whirring. A butcher of the English language? No, let’s give him a massive slab of the benefit of the doubt and declare Harry Redknapp, the manager of north London’s Tottenham Hotspur, a poet. It is debatable whether he fits neatly into the category of ‘great mind’ – the prerequisite entry requirement on this blog for your quote to undergo banal comment – but we’ll allow him to sneak in this time.
You see, I’ve been told and taught that one should never mix one’s metaphors. But I think in this instance Redknapp has spouted verse – much like Shakespeare (kind of). How clever of him to mix the two sayings by monetary theme – a piece of literary brilliance, no? I personally think that mixed metaphors can evoke wonderful images. I unashamedly wrote this sometime back: ‘… when the muse takes you, you can strike with a hot iron.’ Oh, the irony of the muse falling victim to a stylistic solecism.
But back to Redknapp. He’s set up is imagery brilliantly. Harry’s small (cheap?) unit of money, the penny, is precariously balanced – dependent entirely on whether the quality of the conversation improves in value or not. Ah, the anticipation and tension his words have created. To make it even more brilliant, it was in a reference to a player’s career and his unfulfilled talent, the subtext being that the player wouldn’t be getting another lucrative contract if his talk wasn’t up to standard. No more pennies for David Bentley. Or maybe lot’s of pennies? I’ve no idea – such superb ambiguity.
I’m not even a Spurs fan. I can only dream of the manager of the football club closest to my heart coming out with such verbal brilliance. And the shame of it is that my home town has had heavyweight champions of poetry such as Byron and Tennyson pass through as students. You’d hope that at least some of their wordsmithery had filtered into the local soccer psyche. Alas, it seems not. I long for a flowery lament for the latest loss or a panegyric to the players on the rare occasion of a victory.
So the moral of Harry’s story is this: mangle your metaphors whenever possible. I’d like to see more people backed into a corner without a paddle, John like a raging bull flying down the street, a big cheese like a rabbit in the headlights … and so on.
