Athletics problems are sticky wickets that must be confronted with a sustained effort.
Which means he's batting on a very sticky wicket.
Heavy rain fell overnight, and next day the pitch soon developed into a traditional sticky wicket.
The full phrase is thought to have originally been "to bat on a sticky wicket."
Morris won the toss and elected to bat on a sticky wicket.
The following day, the pitch dried out under the hot sun and turned into a sticky wicket.
Actually, this one turns out to be a sticky wicket (as they say, um, somewhere, I think).
Play resumed only 10 minutes late the next day, but "England were twice caught on sticky wickets.
On such sticky wickets his return of 14 for 43 beat Hampshire in a day's cricket.
Like trying to fight a tar baby, I thought.
He's smart to try not to get himself stuck to this tar baby.
"They have the intellectual capacity and responsiveness of a tar baby."
It's the bills at the end of the month, the Tar Baby.
The plot is a bit like the tar baby: whoever comes in contact with it gets stuck.
His pardon of Richard Nixon had turned into a political tar baby.
Match the Tar Baby, indeed, and run short of fuel or blow up!
"It's regarded as a tar baby," said the legislator about the scandal.
The common colloquial sense today of tar baby is "a sticky problem, one better left untouched."