go ahead vs open the ball

go ahead

verb
  • To proceed with; to begin. 

  • Used to grant permission for or to give endorsement of a suggestion or proposal. 

  • To send communication over the radio. 

open the ball

verb
  • To begin operations; to set things in motion. 

How often have the words go ahead and open the ball occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )