Bury the ball (in the net)

We have lots of different ways of describing goals in football and when a player really strikes the ball hard and gives the keeper no chance we can say that the player has buried the ball in the back of the net – they have scored with a really hard shot.

Of course, the verb ‘to bury‘ means to put something in the ground and so in football the suggestion is that if a player buries the ball in the back of the net, the ball is not coming back; it is an emphatic goal and the keeper and defence can do nothing about it. Sometimes we might hear the shortened form ‘she buried it’ meaning that the ball was emphatically struck into the goal or net.

Example: ‘Nairn buried the ball in the far corner of the net for her first goal with Reign FC since her 2013 rookie season’.