Sporting Metaphors, Analogies and Similes

Formula one racing is like balancing an egg on a spoon whilst shooting rapids.

Yachting is like standing in a cold shower and tearing up hundred-dollar bills.

American football combines the two worst features of modern life: violence punctuated by committee meetings.

Cyclists race each other like flocks of Day-Glo geese.

Today has been a decathlon of torments.

His old-fashioned glasses are too big even for Dennis Taylor to use for snooker.

Finishing this project on time is the equivalent elation of playing a game of 501 darts to a nine-dart finish.

As a boxer my nickname was Rembrandt because I spent so much time on the canvas.

Muhammad Ali leaned so far back on the ropes like a man leaning out of his window to see if something is on his roof.

As reliable as the English weather when cricket hosts a Test Match.

Sport is war minus the shooting.

George Orwell

Golf

He said my backswing off the first tee looked like an elderly slattern of dubious morals struggling out of a dress too tight around the shoulders.

Of all golf's hazards, fear is the worst.

Sam Snead

Golf is like a love affair. If you don't take it seriously, it's no fun; if you do take it seriously, it breaks your heart.

Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half-inch course: the space between your ears.

Bobby Jones

Playing polo is like playing golf during an earthquake.

The Reverend's golf swing is like an octopus putting up a deckchair.

By the final interview question, I felt like I was taking a four foot putt on the eighteenth green for the Ryder Cup.

The least things upset him on the links. He missed short putts because of the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows.

Football

Pele no longer beats all opponents on the anvil of his brilliance.

Peter Crouch's action is like Bambi on ice.

This team's pre-match posturing to Manchester United is like a sparrow trying to intimidate a chainsaw.

It was an expectant and exciting atmosphere like the morning before your team's Cup Final.

When booking the offending player, Pierluigi Collina's stare could have drilled a hole through a diamond.

A pub isn't the place for a minute's silence, like a funeral isn't a place for announcing football scores.

Robbie Savage would get himself booked playing Handel's Largo.

Drogba has the strength of a bull and the pain threshold of a lamb.

( Manchester City ) There are three types of Oxo cubes: light brown for chicken stock, dark brown for beef stock and light blue for laughing stock.

The club have made some new signings but it's like putting lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig.

If you needed someone to take a penalty kick to save your life, Chris Waddle, with his hunched shoulders and lethargic gait, ranks below Long John Silver.

An old bra of a football team — no cups and hardly any support.

The difference between Everton and the Queen Mary is that Everton can carry more passengers.

Bill Shankly

The jubilant opposition team stampeded the touchline in front of their fans like a herd of David Pleats.

Comparing Paul Gascoigne to Pelé is like comparing Rolf Harris to Rembrandt.

Rodney Marsh

Alex Ferguson resembles an irritable pensioner who has watched too many episodes of The Sopranos.

For a 'causal' to turn up at a football match with the wrong trainers is equivalent to arriving at the Opera in Star Trek pyjamas.

To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and gut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink.

J.B. Priestley

The tour manager warn us that any more trouble and, like Scotland at the World Cup, we'd be going home before the postcards.

Tennis

McEnroe has higher blood pressure than a giraffe.

As explosive as playing tennis with a hand-grenade.

Marat Safin has the most unstable temperament since Henry VIII.

Sharapova's grunts sound like a live pig being slaughtered.

Running

After all these doping scandals, perhaps athletics can learn some integrity and honesty from other sports, e.g. horse racing and wrestling.

In distance running it's the lean wolf that leads the pack.

While lining up on the 1500m start-line, I felt like a mule at a racetrack.