- Kenyan sports journalists tend to overuse the term barren draw.
- The top suggestions you see on Google when you search “barren draw” originate from Kenyan sources.
Words are fickle friends. They are charming little chameleons that preen with meaning in one location then they shed it like a moulting iguana when they move to another place. Words and phrases, though verbal, have demonstrated an ability to become flesh and calcify onto a geographical location with an appeal that fades the closer you get to the border with another territory.
Take the phrase “barren draw” for instance, a term which for local football fans describes a wasted afternoon, AFC Leopards vs Gor Mahia with everything on the line only for neither to shake the other’s net. However, despite its rather obvious application and meaning, the use of the phrase is almost tightly bound to the contours of Kenya.
Even Google, that industrial archivist of information, is convinced of that fact. The top suggestions you see on the omniscient platform when you search “barren draw” originate from Kenyan sources. Results showing sources originating from Tanzania (yes, Tanzania appears on this list), Uganda, Nigeria, and some southern African countries only dot the list after Kenyan sources have swept the top suggestions podium.
To eliminate the bias arising from Google hinging on my location, Kenya, to prioritise the listing of Kenyan sources among the top suggestions, I burdened friends in Australia (Melbourne and Sydney), Canada (Ottawa and Toronto), the Cayman Islands, the United Kingdom (London), and the United States of America (Colorado, Michigan, and Ohio) to carry out a similar search and, to a pleasant surprise, their feedback mirrored results of a men’s 3 000 metres steeplechase race during the Ezekiel Kemboi years, a total Kenyan domination of the top suggestions.
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In the United Kingdom, the country whose colonisation of Kenya established English as a lingua franca in the East African nation, the term “goalless draw” is preferred in reporting of football matches that end 0-0. They, the British, at least from my research, never use the term “barren draw”.
The same was also observed after sampling reporting of football matches played in Australia, the Caribbean Islands, New Zealand, and the United States. However, in India, the two terms, “barren draw” and “goalless draw”, appear to be in active use, raising questions on how the former spread between Africa and India.
That observation on the prevalent use of the phrase “barren draw” by Kenyan sports journalists, and the concomitant disconnect with Anglophone and Commonwealth countries outside Africa, triggered a reflection on the genesis of the term’s application in match reporting in Kenya.
As logic would have it, that reflection triggered a need to search for evidence of use of the term in the earliest match reports on Kenyan football, an effort that wound the clock 100 years back to the 1920s when Kenyans started playing football actively.
From the most readily available source, Roy Gachuhi’s KICKOFF: The Game, The Glory, and the Greats of Kenyan Football, a book chronicling the history of Kenyan football, presented an answer that did not tell the whole story. A report he shares of a goalless match played in 1945 between CMS Nairobi and Catholic Union only states, “Time arrived with the score 0/0.”
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Other findings bear interesting observations on the type of football played those days – 0-0 draws were rare, perhaps making it unnecessary to have a term that describes goalless matches. For instance, in its first 100 matches, played over 39 years, Kenya drew 0-0 only thrice, with the first two such draws coming 29 years apart, in 1930 and 1959. In Harambee Stars’ last 100 matches, played over 10 years, 12 matches have ended goalless.
Even though the scores are not available, the first season of the Kenyan national football league, played in 1963, produced only four draws from 45 matches played, 9% of the total. It could not be established how many of those four matches ended 0-0 but three years later, the 1966 season ended with 14 out of the 132 matches played ending in a draw, 11% of the total. The 2023/24 FKF Premier League produced 90 draws in 306 matches, accounting for 29% of the total matches played.
Based on that, it can be deduced that the number of 0-0 draws have been increasing at a similar frequency hence requiring the need of creation of terms such as “barren draw” and “goalless draw” to describe such matches.
However, that deduction does not answer how exactly Kenyan sports journalists developed a preference for using the phrase “barren draw” in reporting of matches that ended 0-0.
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The urge to find the missing link led to a conversation with Roy Gachuhi, a veteran sports journalist who is an oracle on Kenyan football as attested by his coverage of the sport in the country since the 1970s.
Gachuhi’s response will not please many a Kenyan sports journalists as he attributes popular use of the phrase to lazy journalism, in the context of Kenyan football scribes failing to enrich Kenyan football lexicon with new terms.
“The common use of the phrase “barren draw” is just due to laziness. Journalists just use the term because it has been around for years. They do not bother to interrogate its origin and come up with new terms,” Gachuhi, who admitted to using the term interchangeably with “goalless draw” and other phrases he came up with during his days as sports reporter, told SportPesa Blog.
Gachuhi, per his admission, ceased reporting on football matches many moons ago to focus more on in-depth analysis of Kenyan football and chronicling of his history. His insight ignited a thought to check what terms are used in other languages to describe matches that end 0-0 and how they compare to English.
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The first of these languages was Kiswahili, which as it will please Roy Gachuhi, has an abundance of terms that include sare tasa, nunge kwa nunge, sifuri bin sifuri, suluhu bin suluhu, among others. While the latter three terms translate to English as zero-zero, sare tasa transforms to barren draw, evoking the hypothesis that the use of “barren draw” among Kenyan and Tanzanian sports journalists may have resulted from a direct translation of sare tasa.
The equivalent phrases used in French and Italian tend to support the proponents of “barren draw” and sare tasa that football is about penetration, and lack of it can only arouse thoughts of sterility, or, in this case, barrenness.
In France, the phrases used are match nul et vierge and match nul et sterile, which translate to “goalless draw” and “barren draw” respectively. Vierge is the French word for “virgin”, a word whose use in describing matches that end goalless gives a whole new meaning to the term “clean sheet”, a goalkeeper’s favourite phrase.
In Italy, the phrases used are pareggio a reti inviolate and sterile pareggio, which translate to “goalless draw” and “barren draw” respectively. Of interest is the first phrase, pareggio a reti inviolate, which by directly translating to “a draw which leaves the nets untarnished”, unites with its French equivalent in sneaking in subtle sexual connotation in sports reporting.
Unlike the French and the Italians, who have cemented their famous reputation in possessing a proclivity to be randy and romantic, the Dutch, the Germans, the Portuguese, and the Spaniards, prefer to keep it simple like English by using phrases which translate to “goalless draw”. The phrases they use are doelpuntloos gelijkspel, torloses Unentschieden, empate sem gols, and empate sin goles.
While it was not possible to establish when and how “barren draw” surfaced into popular in reporting of Kenyan football matches that end 0-0, it can be easily stated that the term will not go away anytime soon and that, perhaps, should give more time to interrogate its origin in Kenyan football lexicon.
PS: A conversation with another veteran sports journalist, Gishinga Njoroge, on this subject somehow veered to being an amusing discussion about the origin of Harambee Stars as the nickname for the Kenyan national football team. That discussion, boosted with more insight from a separate conversation with Roy Gachuhi, makes for a good story for another day. Watch this space.