Boris Johnson’s attempt to compare climate change to a football match made no sense at all

Boris Johnson has, in recent days, developed a habit of comparing the climate crisis to a football match but his analogy definitely needs some work.

In an impromptu speech at Downing Street on Tuesday evening, after he had returned from COP26 in Glasgow, the prime minister tried to illustrate the fight against climate as a dramatic comeback in a football game.

He said: “If this was a football match, the current score would be 5-1 down in the match between humanity and climate change. What I think you can say today after two days of talks with around 120 world leaders is that we’ve pulled back a goal, or perhaps even two, and I think we’re going to be able to take this thing to extra time.”

We don’t know where to start with this analogy.

Let’s start with the scoreline. 5-1 down is a pretty hefty margin to make any sort of comeback from. Just a few days ago Johnson suggested that humanity was down by this score at half-time, which would give Humanity FC a bit more time to make their dramatic resurrection but it’s still an almighty task and there’s no accounting for what kind of headspace those players will be in after such a thrashing.

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Secondly, even if humanity did manage to raise their game in the second half and score a goal or two, that would only take the score to 5-3 at best which we hate to say would not take a match to extra time. Nor would it even constitute a replay. Just a comprehensive victory for climate change, who might have regretted not adding to their tally in the second half.

It’s hard to believe that the prime minister attending England’s Euro 2020 semi-final with Denmark and the final with Italy at Wembley this summer – two matchesthat both went to extra-time – has managed to show such a colossal misunderstanding of football.

Needless to say, people were not impressed.

Perhaps Johnson should take some advice on football analogies from Dr Jonathan Van Tam although we fear he’s been chatting about “footy” with Iain Duncan Smith too much.