hard yards

 This expression originated in American Football, a game in which the field of play is measured in yards. The team attempting to reach the other team’s end zone does so by gaining yards of forward movement. They must gain 10 yards in four forward plays to be able to continue. 

The expression was transferred to various forms of rugby in Australia with a more generalised meaning because that game doesn’t have the field marked off in yards. But it does have the same sense of having to fight to complete forward movements before being required to kick the ball.  The hard yards that the team has to travel is the area from the start of play to the goal area. 

In Australian English the expression left the football field and gained a life of its own applied to situations in which someone had to fight hard through many difficulties to get to the goal they wished to achieve.  You had to do the hard yards or put in the hard yards to deserve such success.

But the situation has been complicated by the reduction of hard yards to hard yard, conjuring up the notion of some disastrous paddock that you have to escape before you can sail through to victory.  The move from plural to singular, as in to do or gain the hard yard,  allows for an adjectival use as in hard-yard solutions.  In business it seems that everyone is trying to escape the hard yard.

The problem is that the idiomatic expression to do the hard yards has lost its mooring in football completely so that the literal meaning is no longer visible. In the absence of that football underpinning people are refashioning the phrase to make some kind of sense. Or nonsense.