It’s another sporting term this week. A hat-trick is when someone has three successes in a row. It’s most often used in football for when the same player scores three goals in the same game (not necessarily consecutively). We also use it metaphorically when lots of good stuff happens in a row.
So what put the hat into hat-trick? Well, the answer isn’t football, but cricket. ‘Hat-trick’ first appeared in the 19th century when a bowler who took three wickets with three consecutive balls was often rewarded with a hat – or there would be a collection for the bowler to buy a hat. This is believed to date back to 1858, when HH Stephenson, an English cricket player during the game’s roundarm era (I don’t know what this means), took three wickets in three consecutive deliveries (I also don’t know what this means. Various male relatives and ex-boyfriends have tried to explain the rules of cricket to me. None have succeeded). This was for the All-England Eleven against the twenty-two of Hallam at the Hyde Park ground in Sheffield, in 1858. To celebrate this achievement, the spectators held a collection (something which was quite usual at the time when a professional sportsperson did something great), and Stephenson was given a hat bought with the proceeds.
The term ‘hat-trick’ first appeared in print in 1865 in the Chelmsford Chronicle (now the Essex Chronicle) and was eventually adopted by lots of other sports, including football. And the first hat-trick in an international soccer game was by Scottish player John McDougall against England on 2 March 1878 (which is exactly 100 years before I was born). And the fastest World Cup hat-trick, measured by time between goals, belongs to Fabienne Humm of Switzerland, who scored her three goals in the 47th, 49th and 52nd minutes against Ecuador in the 2015 group stage.
Footballers who score hat-tricks don’t get a hat, sadly, but traditionally they’re allowed to keep the match ball as a memento. Oh, and if you score two goals in a match, it’s called a ‘brace’.
