Nice Pass

Some of you who know me know that I love the Urban Dictionary. Words like ‘crunk’ which stands for ‘crazy drunk’ and ‘stoptional’ for ‘optional stop’ – they make my day. Look, you can even use them together: “Ha ha, he was so crunk he thought the four way stop at the intersection was stoptional.” Actually it’s not a very good example sentence, when I think about it. Let it be known that I don’t endorse drunk driving in my blog.

Because of this love of weird dictionary definitions, I have decided to make my own dictionary definitions for the phrase “nice pass”, in soccer. You might think you know what it means, but I doubt you know all of its meanings. You know how we have been told that Inuit people have many words for snow? It’s kinda like that. Allow me to show you.

1. “Nice Pass!” Said in a shocking tone when a girl is playing with the boys and does a lovely cross from the corner into the middle, resulting in a beautiful goal. Here the phrase does, in fact, mean ‘nice pass’. Rarely used from male to male, since it might seem gay.

2. “Nice Pass.” said in a mocking tone to a friend playing on the other team who does not do a nice pass to their teammate, but accidently gives the ball directly to you, an opponent. Here the phrase is being used sarcastically. You might want to beware of getting hacked in the knees from behind by said friend when you use this phrase.

3. “Nice Pass,” said in a disappointed tone when someone on your team who is not as good as you passes you a not-very-nice pass and you screw it up further by missing a shot on net. Said to make the teammate feel better about their shoddy play. A consolation prize. Sometimes accompanied by head held in hands when the lousy player is not looking.

4. “Nice Pass!” said from one player to another when the first player could have selfishly taken a shot on net, and probably missed, but decided against it and laid off a beautiful gift of a pass to another player who gets the goal and all the glory. It means “I feel guilty that you teed it up so beautifully for me (but not that guilty since it was my amazing shot that scored), and I should acknowledge in some way your assistance.”

5. “Nice Pass! Pff!” Notice the extra tag-along at the end, the ‘pff.’ This is the sour grapes use of this word, since someone on the opposite team was trying to pass to someone else on their team but the pass was so bad that they accidentally scored a nice goal.

6. “Nice Pass!” Said sarcastically, but not entirely untruthfully, since the player who did pass it almost never passes it at all, but is a major ball hog and normally just dipsy-doodles all over the field but for some reason, decided today was a good day for sharing and sent it over to you. A combination of sarcasm and an attempt to encourage more of the same passing behaviour in future.

You see why they call it the beautiful game?