What Is The Origin Of (269)?…
Moving the goalposts
One of the (many) pleasures of being retired is that I have
escaped the dread pall of management speak. “You’ve moved the goalposts”
was the cry of many a manager when they realised that budgets and targets
painstakingly agreed at the start of the year had been adjusted by fiat and
that their chances of getting their bonus had gone out of the window. Moving
the goalposts is a figurative way of describing that a target has been changed
to give one side an advantage.
Some authorities seem to think that it is a very recent
neologism, basing their claim on a report in the Jamaican newspaper, the
Gleaner, which quoted the British Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time,
Nigel Lawson, as saying, “I see no reason to move the goalposts at all”.
But that is not the start or the end of the matter.
Some of most popular team sports like football, rugby (both
codes) and American football, use goal posts positioned at either end of the
pitch, and the object, either in whole or in part, is to get the ball inside or
over them. The posts are supposed to be perfectly aligned with each other and
sporting maestros perfect their techniques to be able to put the ball into the
requisite spot from all angles and parts of the pitch. If one set of goalposts
are out of line then that puts the team defending them at an advantage.
The most infamous occurrence in professional football
occurred in September 2009 when IFK Gothenburg goalkeeper, Kim Christensen, was
pictured nudging the goalposts he was guarding with his shoulder to make it
less than the regulation width of eight yards. In Sweden goalposts rest on the
ground rather than sunk into the earth. The referee, Stefan Johansson, only
noticed the discrepancy midway through the first half and as he wasn’t sure it
was Christensen who was the culprit, he took no action other than moving them
back to the right width.
Those of us who follow teams blessed with players who couldn’t
hit the proverbial elephant’s backside with a banjo often console ourselves
when a shot goes flying into the stands missing the target by a country mile
that someone must have moved the goalposts. Alternatively, to accommodate a
collection of wayward shooters, the posts could be shifted to an area that the
incompetents might be able to reach. This seems to have been an idea popular
with Scottish football supporters. A match between Forfar Athletic and Montrose,
it finished goalless of course, was notable for the waywardness of the Montrose
forwards, leading the Forfar Herald, in its edition of February 21, 1946, to
observe; ““Shift the goalposts”, said someone as the seasiders repeatedly
finished wide of the mark”.
The Forfar forwards were not averse to demonstrating their
own incompetence. When they were playing Stirling Albion, the Forfar Herald, in
their report on March 11, 1948, was left to remark that there were “occasions
when the old gag, “shift the goalposts”, could justifiably be applied to the
home finishing”.
We rarely hold general elections in December. The one held
in 1923 was significant in that it marked the end of the Liberal Party as one
of the two main political parties in parliament. Disenchanted with the
first-past-the-post system, they tried to introduce a bill promoting
proportional representation. In the ensuing debate the Socialist MP for
Glasgow, Springburn, George Hardie, was reported in The Scotsman on May 3, 1924
as saying, “the Liberals, having been beaten, not only wanted to change the
rules of the game, but wanted to shift the goal posts because they could not
play any more”. They are still trying.
What are we to make of all this?
The phrase has probably been around since at least the beginning
of the 20th century, in popular speech if not in the written form,
and is likely to have existed almost as long as organised games involving fixed
goalposts. It is more than likely, too, that it was Scottish in origin.
