On injury time? 伤停补时

Reader question:

Please explain “injury time” in this quote: “I’m 61. I’m on injury time.”

My comments:

The speaker is 61 years old and he (or she) thinks his time on earth is limited.

In other words, his days are numbered. He will not be long for this world.

That sounds too bad, right?

Right.

I hope the speaker is just kidding. I hope he’ll have many long happy years ahead of him.

Anyways, that’s what he means when he says he’s on injury time, and he’s not talking about any real injuries or illnesses.

Injury time, you see, is a term in soccer or hockey. If you follow English football, for example, then you’ll hear the announcer mention “injury time” numerable times in each and every game.

By definition, “injury time” refers to a period of time added at the end of regular playing time to make up for the time lost to treating injured players during the game.

In fact, a few minutes are added to each half, which lasts 45 minutes. After 45 minutes of the first half is over, you see an official holding a sign showing 3 or 4 or 5, 6, 7 minutes will be added on.

And that means 3 or 4 or 5, 6, 7 minutes, as the case may be, are lost during the first half, due to playing injuries or altercations (physical fights between players who lose their cool; football, after all, is a physical game or, to in technical jargon, a contact sport) and other time-wasting incidents.

Similarly, at the end of 90 minutes, a few more minutes are added.

Although the minutes of injury time vary from game to game, its length is limited. Usually, it lasts just two or three minutes.

In other words, not long.

That’s why the speaker in our example says he’s 61 and hence on injury time, meaning his time is limited.

He feels he’s on borrowed time.

Age is relative, by the way. Sixty-one years of age may be old to some, but to others sixty-one is pretty young. They may still think like a young man, that they have all the time in the world to enjoy themselves.

As the saying goes, 60 is the new 40.

All right, anyways, here are a few media examples of “injury time”:

1. If the United States wins the gold medal in Olympic women’s soccer on Thursday, Diamond Bar will have provided a major component of the accomplishment.

That contribution, of course, is Alex Morgan, the exciting young star who graduated from Diamond Bar High School and UC Berkeley.

Morgan, just 23, burst onto the international scene with her play in last year’s World Cup tournament in Germany, where the U.S. lost in the finals to Japan – the same team they’ll face in Thursday’s final round.

She has continued to thrill fans in the London Olympics, where she scored a heart-stopping winning goal against Canada to propel the U.S. team into the finals.

It was an improbable goal, coming in the third of three minutes of extra injury time – literally, a last-minute score. And it was a header, unusual for Morgan, who is much better known for scoring off her foot.

“I’ve never wanted to cry on a field after scoring a goal,” Morgan said later. “It was the best feeling ever.”

- Morgan, U.S. go for soccer gold, DailyBulletin.com, August 8, 2012.

2. Since its restoration the lattice-girdered Bascule Bridge doesn’t rattle like it used to, but the lorries still thunder past on Liverpool’s Regent Road heading into the city-centre or north to the scrapyards, silos and container port. One big angry truck, oblivious it’d seem to the floral bouquets tied at the roadside with Everton-blue ribbons, honks its horn as it swerves around a couple of elderly cyclists riding side-by-side and threatening to add some injury time, literally, to their life expectancy. The nearside rider acknowledges their highway indiscretion by raising his right fist and middle finger.

Charming, this northern stretch of the Dock Road on a sunny day. I’ve stopped and propped my own two wheels against the perimeter wall of the old Tobacco Warehouse so I can perch on the bridge for a look at the even earlier Stanley Warehouse on the other side of the dock water. ‘Evocatively derelict’ is how it’s described by writer Joseph Sharples in the Pevsner Architectural Guide to Liverpool. The view is the spitting image, minus a bit of lipstick and TLC, of Albert Dock a mile or so south – the same five-storeyed brick facade built upon basement vaults and a colonnade of cast-iron columns, in turn rising from a familiar quayside jigsaw-puzzle of granite blocks and rubble. The great Jesse Hartley was the architect behind both, Albert in 1847, Stanley in 1856.

But something is happening to Stanley Warehouse, it’s slowly waking up from its long slumber. A red crane looms overhead. There are workmen and diggers onsite and compliance notices on the walls. It’s being converted into a four-star hotel by an ambitious Irish developer called Harcourt, evidently banking upon the progress of the Peel Port Group's so-called Liverpool Waters masterplan – in which 150 acres of largely obsolete waterfront in this area will be transformed into a new ‘mixed-use quarter’ over the next three decades. Thirty years – I’ll be either dead or flicking Vs at truckers by then.

All this used to be called the Central Docks before Peel moved in. On the map they start a little further south at Waterloo Dock, opened in 1834 to handle grain imports from North America. Then, after Stanley Dock and the adjacent Collingwood Dock - through whose gates passed most of the million Irish migrants who fled the famine and ‘took the ship’ to Liverpool in the 1840s – comes Salisbury Dock, Nelson Dock, Bramley Moore Dock, Wellington Dock, Sandon Dock, Huskisson Dock, Canada Dock, Brocklebank Dock and Langton Dock, running right up to Liverpool Freeport’s modern container terminal. Ripe for Peel’s redevelopment today, they were a riot of commotion 150 years ago as novelist Herman Melville recounted in his 1849 book Redburn: ‘Here are brought together the remotest limits of the earth; and in the collective spars and timbers of these ships, all the forests of the globe are represented as in a grand parliament of masts’.

Peel must be happy bunnies right now. Their dredging project to deepen the Mersey approach channel to 53ft, allowing the world’s biggest post-Panamax container ships to dock at a proposed new container terminal called Liverpool2, got ￡35 million from the government – and they got Kenny Dalglish and Bobby Charlton to represent Liverpool and Manchester at the ground-breaking ceremony. One Peel official billed it as ‘a catalyst of change for the whole region’ and ‘fantastic news for UK plc’. Navigationally 50ft is a big deal – a really big deal.

- Peel on wheels, TheLiverpolitan.com, June 14, 2013.

3. Injury time in football has quite the absurd definition given its similarity to stoppage time. So what is injury time in soccer?

In stoppage time, non-playing time is summed up more or less and then declared before the end of a half.

Injury time is a subset of stoppage time; it has its own nuanced definition but ultimately is counted for when the fourth official dictates the stoppage time. Injury time is also when Sergio Ramos releases his inner hulk on other players.

If Kevin De Bruyne was injured in a match rather than training, the referee would’ve accounted for the time of assessing his injury and the time it took to get him off the pitch for treatment. That time, injury time, is then added to stoppage time.

In 2013, an Arsenal vs. West Ham United match needed an approximately 13 minutes of stoppage time because of the long addition of injury time. Poor Steve Potts needed 12 minutes of medical assessment and Arsenal capitalized on the player shortage for a relatively easy win.

Then again, easy win and Arsenal don’t really go together, do they?

- What Is Injury Time In Soccer? The18.com, August 17, 2018.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：张欣   编辑：丹妮）