How Bill Clinton scored an own goal at baseball

FANS OF ludicrous sports metaphors (and right now every journalist and politician appears to find them irresistible) will have particularly enjoyed Bill Clinton's recent warning to violent criminals. The import of the President's warning - a highlight, allegedly, of his recent State of the Union speech - was that if an offender commits a third violent crime, he may be jailed for life. Mr Clinton chose, however, to deliver this grave message in the language of baseball. 'Three strikes,' he croaked triumphantly, 'and you're out]' Cue tumultuous applause.

These five words provide much to think about. For a start, there is the unfortunate inaptitude of the phrase. In baseball, a strike is when you don't hit anything, yet the problem that violent criminals pose to society is precisely the reverse: they hit things - skulls, little old ladies, etc - all the time. What Mr Clinton meant was three hits and you're out, but the rules of baseball prevented him from saying this. Three hits in baseball, and you're a hero, a valued member of your team, which is not what the President was trying to communicate at all. Second, there is the unfortunate reminder that the baseball bat is one of the American thug's most treasured possessions; anyone who was walloped by a metrelong piece of aluminium on the day Clinton delivered his address was unlikely to have been greatly comforted by his cheery conceit.

Most importantly, one ended up trying to work out which had come first, the metaphor or the initiative. Was Clinton really just looking for a colourful and illustrative phrase, or did the game dictate the terms of the entire thing? I suspect the latter. Why not sentence violent offenders to life imprisonment after the second offence, or the fourth? Because baseball says it has to be three, that's why. In which case, the terrified citizens of America should be grateful that the sport does not permit, say, a dozen swings of the bat before the batters are sent to the maximum security dressing-room.

Maybe I have been too literal-minded about it all, but politicians cannot have it both ways. They use sports metaphors because so many of us are sports-obsessed, and they believe that it's the only sort of language we understand; they can hardly complain, then, if we point out that half the time they get it wrong. They talk about not playing on a level playing-field, but nobody is inconvenienced by a sloping pitch, because teams in all sports change ends at half-time. (It is true that if one team regularly plays on a sloping pitch and the other doesn't, the home team is likely to gain some kind of advantage, but this situation - the Yeovil Town scenario - is of limited metaphorical value.) They talk about moving the goalposts, but this phenomenon only occurs in politics, not sport - it is hard to recall the last football team that moved the goalposts during a game, and extremely hard to understand why their opponents didn't notice. In politics, no one ever seems to spot that the goalposts are moving, only that they have moved. Well, if they have moved, why keep shooting towards the place where the goal used to be? Could it be that there is no shooting in politics? Could it be, in fact, that this is just another useless sports metaphor?

British sport and British sporting history are uniquely equipped to provide endless hours of figurative fun. We have managed to become third-rate at both cricket and football, even though we are generally regarded as the inventors of both games; gratifyingly, we're getting worse, too, and we seem to have been doing so ever since 1945. So anyone looking for a handy, lazy symbol of post-war decline can always rely on our international sides to provide it. You need a weak and feeble football manager to dramatise the plight of a weak and feeble PM? No problem. You want us to go a goal down to the worst team in the world to demonstrate how low we have sunk? Here comes San Marino. And so on.

It is hard to imagine that this happens anywhere else. Americans don't play any international team sports; the other major European countries are all subject to the usual swings and roundabouts of sporting fortune, and in any case never drop below a certain level of competence. What kind of language do the Norwegians, or the Dutch, or the Germans, or the Italians use when things start going wrong off the pitch? How are you supposed to talk about political turmoil or post-industrial malaise when your football teams keep winning?

Meanwhile, it goes on and on. Douglas Hurd has a safe pair of hands, and plays with a straight bat; the Government is on a sticky wicket; Nigel Lawson took his eye off the ball in the mid-Eighties, and inflation ensued; Michael Heseltine isn't a team player (which makes him . . . who? Pele? Jimmy Greaves? Ian Botham? These are all, paradoxically, pretty handy people to have on your team). In a discussion about the imminent takeover of a Certain Newspaper, one of those involved remarked that 'the half-time score is Mirror Group Newspapers three, Tony O'Reilly nil'; the recent deaths of Bobby Moore, Sir Matt Busby and Danny Blanchflower have provoked an outpouring of longing for better, simpler times. And at Warrington, the IRA scored an own goal, at which point one begins to worry about it all.

Here is the last own goal I saw: Gary McAllister of Leeds takes a free kick, and Tony Adams of Arsenal, in a desperate and comic attempt to clear the ball, heads it instead past his goalkeeper David Seaman. Arsenal lose 2-1. They win the following week. Here is what happened at Warrington: the IRA placed a bomb in a crowded shopping centre and it exploded, killing two children. Can you spot the difference? Sports fans and sports writers are frequently berated for using words - 'tragic', 'horrific', 'disastrous' - that don't really belong to them; maybe in return we can ask those whose business it is to describe the real world to leave our vocabulary alone. It isn't good for much, really, apart from games played by little boys of all ages. It certainly can't cope with anything that matters. -