I’m watching a football match between Chelsea and Manchester United and the announce said “a quarter of an American hour left to go.” Does this mean something other than 15 minutes? How is the expression used?
I’ve never heard it, but i don’t watch football so maybe it’s a football thing.
Maybe it’s a product placement thing?
I rewound and the exact quote was “And so, a quarter of an American hour now for Christian Pulisic.” The context was that Pulisic, who is an American, was coming in as a substitute with 15 minutes left in the match.
Maybe the announcer meant to say “And so, a quarter of an hour now for the American, Christian Pulisic” and just got his words out of order.
Is that even legal in the UK?
I don’t know, but if anyone asks, i can probably talk enough utter bollocks about it
to convince most people !
But not yet, not in this Factual Questions topic, at least not until a few sincere attempts at a factual answer.
Which is a shame, because I had a dad joke about metric timekeeping queued up.
This seems the likely answer.
I was gonna guess they are saying there was a lot injury time due. Hence it would be a “15 minutes” like an American sport, where 15 minutes can mean anything up to an hour with time outs and ad breaks. But I’m not sure your average British football fan would be aware of just how slow American sports are.
Perhaps an American hour is made up of 60 New York minutes.
Brilliant!
It is defintely not a well used or known UK phrase.
I’ve never heard it used anywhere and it seems highly likely that it was merely a mangled sentence that referenced the player’s nationality.
There’s no time like the present.
When we get Football and Baseball, it’s almost never live (some channel will pony up for the SB every year) and always edited. Having lived in the US, not too far from Wrigley Field, I know how long a Baseball game can last.
Hockey and Basketball have bigger audiences here, especially hockey, so we get more live games.
Yeah, that would have been my guess - that the intent was ‘a quarter of an hour of game time, which might play out over a fair bit longer than that in elapsed time owing to stops and starts’
Baseball, like cricket, doesn’t even have a nominal time. Each inning takes as long as it takes to get three outs on each side, and the game takes however long nine innings take (or more, if it’s tied after nine). A baseball game has never lasted as long as the longest cricket games, but there’s no inherent reason it couldn’t.
Football games nominally last for 60 minutes, but there’s so much time spent on the field without the clock running that two or three hours are more typical (longer for games at a high enough level to be televised).
I have only heard the term in Argentina. It meant to arrive at the time specified.
In contrast to the stereotypical relaxed relationship with punctuality Hispanic cultures are often painted with?
That wasn’t it. Pulisic came up in the 74th minute, so 16 minutes left in regulation time, and there wasn’t that much added time expected. I’m pretty sure it was just a mangled sentence. I watch quite a bit of Premier League matches, and I’ve never heard the term “American hour” before (and didn’t even hear it during this match).
I agree it was a mangled wording, but I think in a slightly different way. My guess: he was trying to be cute with “American Hour” as the time when the American plays, similar to how we might say “it’s amateur hour.” And since it’s only fifteen minutes, it’s a quarter of American Hour.
Not sure what you mean about cricket here. If you are suggesting that it just goes on without a time limit until the game is over, that’s not the case. All professional games have a limit of time (usually 3, 4 or 5 days) or deliveries (overs bowled or balls bowled); you do sometimes see a combination of overs and time used. Lower level games are of shorter duration but follow a broadly similar pattern.
However, in the past…Timeless Test - Wikipedia
Until World War II all Tests in Australia were timeless. Only two of these matches were drawn, both against England in 1882, when the matches had to be left unfinished owing to shipping schedules.
Drawn = ran out of time to complete the match.
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