Gilliver's Travels
Peripatetic
This magnificently hackneyed expression will no doubt be trotted out at clubs up and down the land, as one senior player after another makes his sad and lonely exit from the local field of dreams.
But surely, football must be the only remaining industry where someone who's been with the same employer for donkey's years is routinely described as "a good servant". It all smacks of times gone by, when the club chairman / mill owner stuck an extra ten-bob note in the departing, granite-faced custodian's wage packet as, jamming his cloth cap on his Brylcreemed, centre-parted head, he free-wheeled his rusty old bike down the dank cobbles of Hovis Hill in search of a new career down the pit.
Describing the likes of Gary Hart and Michele Kuipers as 'good servants' seems about as journalistically imaginative as Dean Cox only ever being 'diminutive'.
Anyone ever heard 'good servant' used to describe retirees in their own workplace? (Domestic service operatives are excluded, obviously.) If so, do tell!
But surely, football must be the only remaining industry where someone who's been with the same employer for donkey's years is routinely described as "a good servant". It all smacks of times gone by, when the club chairman / mill owner stuck an extra ten-bob note in the departing, granite-faced custodian's wage packet as, jamming his cloth cap on his Brylcreemed, centre-parted head, he free-wheeled his rusty old bike down the dank cobbles of Hovis Hill in search of a new career down the pit.
Describing the likes of Gary Hart and Michele Kuipers as 'good servants' seems about as journalistically imaginative as Dean Cox only ever being 'diminutive'.
Anyone ever heard 'good servant' used to describe retirees in their own workplace? (Domestic service operatives are excluded, obviously.) If so, do tell!