Yard of pace
How to understand the football expression “yard of pace”?
What is a “yard of pace”?
What is meant by a yard of pace in football?
Yard of pace is something that fast young strikers always lose at some point in their careers, whether due to being the wrong side of twenty six, or to some dicky hamstrings. Occasionally, a forward who has lost a yard of pace can make up for this by “using their experience”.
This is a euphemism for a player who simply sits around the opponent’s goal waiting for the ball to come their way before standing up and using their conserved energy to belt it towards goal and grab the glory. A player may also “use their experience” to smash any nearby marking defenders in the face with their elbows without detection by the referee.
An “experienced” player who has never been capable of running fast may smugly refer to “not missing what you’ve never had” later in their career.
There seems to be an implication that the player who has lost a “yard of pace” can only run a yard less over a fixed period of time than they would have been able to in their early days.
Curiously however, a “yard of pace” makes absolutely no sense because a yard is a measurement of distance rather than velocity or acceleration. It is an unspoken rule that no-one ever points out this verbal atrocity during discussions of a striker’s merits.
As with all other aspects of British football, in no way may a metric measurement ever be used in place of the old-fashioned imperial equivalent. For example, if a supporter were to observe that a player seems to have lost a “metre of pace”, they would immediately be ridiculed and kicked out of the stadium for being totally clueless about football and/or American.