The phrase "a patch on it" is not correct in standard English usage.
It is often used in informal contexts to indicate that something is not as good as something else.
Example: "The new restaurant isn't a patch on the one we used to go to; the food there was much better."
Alternatives: "not a patch on" or "nowhere near as good as".
Today's overpopulation hysteria is not a patch on what it was a hundred years ago, however, when mainstream intellectuals such as HG Wells, WB Yeats, Virginia Woolf and DH Lawrence were proposing not just sterilisation but actual extermination.
It has a big patch on it that says "Made by the Cherokees," which was meant to be taken off but she left it on, of course.
One review says: "it's obviously not a patch on Spielberg's classic, but it's about as good as could be hoped for, with some excellent sequences, almost worthy of the original, several genuine shocks, a different enough story and some pretty decent characters".
Nor was she a patch on her predecessor when it came to presenting Israel's case abroad.
Earl is Huey's brother, his junior by two years and his survivor by a quarter of a century, and although Fournet had said that Earl "wouldn't make a patch on Huey's pants," it seemed to me that he was filling a pretty fair pair of country britches.
Neurons can make or break connections on the fly, allowing brains to adapt themselves to a task, while the wiring of most silicon chips is fixed.Biological brains are not a patch on traditional computers when it comes to raw number-crunching.
Lieberman generously suggested the president is "not going to do it every day" (phew), but he did argue "we need the capacity for the president to say, Internet service provider, we've got to disconnect the American Internet from all traffic coming in from another foreign country, or we've got to put a patch on this part of it".
Rossiiskaya Gazeta, a state-owned newspaper, said the BBC's version was "not a patch" on Bondarchuk's, and that it lacked reverence for Tolstoy's text.
The five-megapixel camera on the back is solid for a tablet, but is not a patch on most good smartphone cameras – it will do for the occasional snap but will not replace a point-and-shoot camera.
Some of this lack of performance can be put down to a Mercedes car that is not a patch on the Brawn that preceded it, which Jenson Button drove to last year's world title.
