You've classed a thump as being 24-0 however if that score was in a cup final then it would be a humiliation, kinda like a 27-0 scoreline

Well, yeah, you should take these in the context of two "supposedly" even matched teams.

Like today, Warrington-Harlequins, you would have expected to be evenly matched given both team's form, injury and league position. The headline on teletext was indeed "Wolves humiliate Harlequins".

Likewise ourselves and Huddersfield was a tough one to call (and I believe the bookies had Hudds as favourites).

All I'm getting at is that so often I see scorelines where there's about 10-14 points between the teams, and they have a headline that uses the word "Thump" or "Thrash", when in all honesty, it was nothing of the sort.

You are right in what you say mate but I suppose there's 2 other things to consider. Firstly the performace, for example our defence was immense vs Huddersfield and we offered plenty in attack too. Based just on the scoreline the game is nothing special but as we all know the lads really put in an unbelievable display defensively so in that regard we did "thump" them. Also don't forget the main purpose of a headline is to grab attention and make people read the article, one that says "Wigan Thump the Giants!" is going to attract more readers than one that says "Wigan win at Huddersfield" or "Wigan too good for Giants!" etc.

Just keeping in with the fairness, there wasn't such a headline this weekend, but it has been used for similar scorelines. I only used Huddersfield as the most obvious (and recent) example of a match that wasn't particularly one-sided or hinged on 2 to 4 points.

I HAVE seen it used on a margin of 10. Even 10-0, I would [inever[/i call a margin of ten a thumping.