"The ball will be in their … corner"?

Mixed metaphor of the week – via email from J.H.:

House Speaker Mike Johnson, apparently trying to lay the groundwork to blame Democrats for a government shutdown, is quoted by Politico as saying “The ball will be in their corner.”

Presumably he meant to say “The ball will be in their court,” a tennis metaphor, but confused this with “in their corner,” which I assume comes from boxing. When someone is in your corner, that typically means they’re supporting you, and I don’t think the speaker meant to imply that Democrats have the support of any balls.

Someone at Politico must have thought this sounded odd, since they put ‘corner’ in quotation marks in the headline.

A quick search didn't turn up the audio — with luck a reader will fill the gap.