Battered, often undermined by the profile and financial might of the Premier and Champions Leagues, on days like these the FA Cup reminds us that the game remains one.
And if you get battered often and hard enough, you'll eventually only look for love in places where you can't get hurt anymore, and that means with people you don't really care enough about to hurt you.
Until recently, he drove a 1989 eggplant-colored Cadillac Seville that was so battered, people often mistook it for a gypsy cab and tried to hail it.
If the French croque monsieur and the American grilled cheese had a child, it would be the Monte Cristo: a sandwich filled with cheese and sliced meat, battered and often deep-fried.
Bruised and battered more often than not, Roethlisberger will officially be getting back a rusty Mike Wallace, but his questionable offensive line has suffered a major blow with the first-round draft pick David DeCastro going down with a potential season-ending knee injury.
Hush puppies are small cakes of cornbread batter, often with chopped onions, fried in deep fat, and customarily served as an accompaniment to fried fish.
He had five strikeouts in the first four innings, and he kept his pitches low in the strike zone; the Rockies' batters often grounded out when they made contact.
Popovers — so named for the way the batter often rises up and over the sides of its molds — grew out of English Yorkshire pudding, except that the former is mostly made with butter and the latter with meat drippings.
Thick, excessive batter, often a problem with deep-fried seafood, might have overwhelmed our order of fried oysters, but the six bivalves themselves were so big and juicy they surmounted their wrappings.
But the effectiveness of Martinez's changeup and curveball is helped because hitters must anticipate his fastball, and similarly, batters often flail at Johnson's slider because they assume he will throw a fastball.
Dickey, the only knuckleballer in the major leagues, has become dominant courtesy of a strange, near spin-free pitch that hovers en route to home plate, then takes a trap-door drop that batters often can't see or predict.
