Case in point: Jesse Lingard. Or rather a goal of his. First of all, the on-loan wide forward been excellent for West Ham since he went there on loan. No question. But although I didn’t watch their game at Wolves a couple of Monday’s ago, when I read the report the next day and saw that Jesse had scored a ‘goal of the season contender’, I immediately looked it up online.

I was expecting something like the Sistine Chapel of goals, or at least the sculpture of Moses, but it was neither, although to be fair the Wolves team did part like the Red Sea. Now don’t get me wrong. It was a good goal, a really good goal in fact. But Goal of the Season contender? I’m not having that. Not one single Wolves player made an attempt to stop him and their defence and midfield had more holes than the BBC’s Swiss Cheese Model. I don’t think I’m being unfair either. Watch it back yourself if you think I am. When put alongside previous goals of the season, it’s like comparing St. Peter’s Basilica with a three-bed semi.  

Some, like Robin Van Persie and Jamie Vardy, showed amazing skill and technique, others were wonderfully accurate strikes from long range like Vincent Company’s, or spectacular overhead kicks / shins (delete as applicable) from Wayne Rooney and Emre Can into the top corner. Occasionally they are a frankly surreal moment (Papu Cisse) that defies logic, and maybe even physics.

More comparable to Lingard’s effort was the 2019/20 winner when Son Heung-Min ran even further to score against Burnley at Wembley. But Son beat at least two players in his own half and hurdled another challenge after that before he could even think about shooting. If Lingard’s goal is a contender, then I’m afraid we’ve lowered our standards. But is it more a case of a lazy journalist succumbing to unnecessary hyperbole to make more of something than is really there?

Another pet hate of mine – almost as annoying as referring to ’10-man Everton’ if they had a player sent off in the 87^th minute – when it comes to match reporting, is the use of the word ‘thrash’. On any given day, they’ll be a reference in the headlines to a team being thrashed.

Now, I quite like the word, and it definitely feels like it has a place in football. But within limits. I’m not saying that the word thrash should only be reserved for whichever Premier League team beats Southampton 9-0 in any particular season, and there’s no doubt that eight, seven and six goal beatings are thrashings too. I’d even go as far as the odd 5-0 or maybe, in some circumstances, 5-1s (but only at a push).

But these days I’ll read a headline that says ‘City thrash Fulham’, and I get conned into thinking ‘wow, what happened there?’ only to find it was 3-0. Three-bleeding-nil. I’ve seen some football matches where the team who won 3-0 was lucky to win at all. It’s not a result that should, ever, be described as a thrashing. My worry is that it’s the thin end of the wedge.  How long before 2-0 becomes a thrashing? By the end of this decade, someone will go there. They’ll be a ‘Kilmarnock thrashed by Celtic’ or ‘Barcelona thrash Gijon’ headline staring at you and you’ll be intrigued and then you’ll find it was actually 2-0, with the second goal coming in added time against 10-men (although only from the 87^th minute).

Where is this going? Well, it got me thinking about the low bar when it comes to the match day experience. Generally speaking, footy fans have always had pretty low expectations on that. In the pre-Covid game (it was also the one – if you can recall that far – where VAR wasn’t deliberately trying to spoil it) fans used to put up with a lot. Especially off the field, which the club can control a lot more than what happens on it.