22 in sport · Britain especially
Twenty-two, on grass.
Every British sport worth an afternoon has at least one 22 in its bones. Some are dimensions; some are squad numbers; one of them is just a surveyor's chain that we never bothered to metric.
- Cricket pitch
- 22 yards, wicket to wicket. This is where the number enters British sport most recognisably. The chain — a surveyor's unit — defined the pitch before the game formalised it.
- Football (association)
- 22 players on the pitch. Shirt 22 has been the bench's unfancied squad number, a reserve goalkeeper's number, a utility defender's number. Beckham wore 22 briefly at Man Utd.
- Rugby
- The 22-metre line — the defensive-half marker from which a back-line drop-out is taken. A full-back's home.
- Darts
- 22 board segments by most counts (20 numbered + doubles ring + triples + bullseyes, depending on how you carve it). '22' as a checkout is a mildly-grim finish: T10, D2; or S20, D1.
- Snooker
- 22 balls on the table (15 reds + 6 colours + cue ball). A mathematically tidy total that nobody ever stops to count.
- Horse-racing
- 'Twenty-two' is bookmakers' slang for odds of 20-1 in some tic-tac dialects — a historical aside more than a present reality.
- Rowing
- A stroke rate of 22 per minute is the rest pace of an eight mid-session. Above 36 is race pace.
- Chess (by loose analogy)
- Not technically, but: 22 moves is a commonly-cited 'out of book' threshold in top-level play. Past 22, you are on your own.
- Catch-22
- Not a sport. Included anyway because the number escaped the barracks and entered the British language unhelpfully fast.
Shirt 22 — an honours board, loosely
- Diego Forlán (Uruguay, Manchester United)
- David Beckham (Manchester United, briefly)
- Pavel Nedvěd (Juventus)
- Samuel Eto'o (Inter) — later Cameroon
- Memphis Depay (Netherlands)
- Marco Asensio (Spain)
- Jordi Alba (Spain) — for stretches
- Ángel Di María (Argentina, frequently)
Notional list; correct submissions welcome.