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Reader question: Please explain this sentence: Players believe they have “shot themselves in the foot” after failing to win their first two matches. My comments: In other words, the players admit they have made mistakes and thus made life difficult for themselves. “Shot themselves in the foot” suggests the players believe the injury to be self-inflicted. Had they played a little bit better and not made stupid mistakes, they probably could’ve won one or both games. Obviously, losing the first two matches to start a campaign isn’t ideal, to say the least. Anyways, to shoot oneself in the foot is the American idiom to learn here. Literally, it means that one aims a shot gun at one’s own foot and pulls the trigger. Needless to say, for something like that to happen it has to be by accident as no-one in his or her right mind will do it on purpose. Except that soldiers did do it on purpose – to get themselves out of the battlefield. Michael Quinion, explaining the said expression in World Wide Words, writes: I found a reference in a 1933 book, Death in the Woods and Other Stories by Sherwood Anderson. An American tells of his experiences as an aviator in the British Army in that war, in which he suffered a bad crash and was taken to hospital: “The fellow who had the bed next to mine had shot himself in the foot to avoid going into a battle. A lot of them did that, but why they picked on their own feet that way is beyond me. It’s a nasty place, full of small bones.” The technique has continued into recent times: hearings held in November 1969 into the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War were told that one soldier had “shot himself in the foot in order to be medivac-ed out of the area so that he would not have to participate in the slaughter.” | 
