Blood and thunder

This expression is often used by sports commentators to describe a style of play that has much passion but little skill or finesse. It seems to have first made its appearance as an exclamation in Tobias Smollet’s The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751). “‘Blood and thunder! Meaning me, sir?’ cried the artist.” Thereafter, around the mid-19th century, it was typically used to describe cheap, trashy literature. George Augustus Sala writing in Gaslight and Daylight in 1859 referred to “cheap literature (among which, I grieve to say, the blood-and-thunder school preponderates).” G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) must have known what he was about when he described Charlotte Bronté’s Jane Eyre as “one of the best blood-and-thunder detective stories in the world”. Since then the expression has been used to describe a certain genre of books, films and, now it seems, rugby and football.