Learn English Through Football

In this short football language podcast we look at some of the language that emerged from the 2021 Women’s Champions League Final between Chelsea and Barcelona. The Catalan side easily won 4-0 and in this podcast we look at how The Guardian Online reported on this victory.  You can read a transcript for this podcast below, along with some vocabulary support at the end of the post, while you can also check out our glossary of footballing phrases here, and visit our site to access all our previous posts and podcasts. If you have any suggestions then you can contact us at admin@languagecaster.com.
Learn English Through Football Podcast: 2021 Women’s Champions League Final
DF: Hello everyone, this is Damian from the Learning English Through Football team. I hope we are all doing well. Now on this short football language podcast we look at some of the words and phrases from the 2021 Women’s Champions League final between Barcelona and Chelsea in which the Spanish champions easily defeated the Women’s Super League champions Chelsea 4-0. You can read a transcript for this podcast by coming along to our site here at languagecaster.com, while you can also find some vocabulary support at the end of the post too.
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Stinger: You are listening to languagecaster.com (in Catalan).
DF: Congratulations to Barcelona on winning their first ever Champions League title after their four-goal demolition of Chelsea in the final and so what we are going to do today is look at some of the language used to describe each of the Catalan side’s goals. To do this we have used the Guardian newspaper’s report – here’s how they described the opening goal.
There are two parts to this description: first we can see that the Barcelona attacker Martens ‘smashed the ball‘ which means to hit it really, really hard but when the ball rebounded off the crossbar, that’s the top part of the goal, it came back into the danger zone, the penalty area, which is why the Chelsea player Kirby wanted to clear it away from danger. However, when she cleared the ball it hit her own player, Leupolz, and rebounded into the net – an own goal. The report describes this own goal as looping over the goalkeeper which means that the ball travelled over the goalkeeper’s head into the net – the idea of looping over the keeper may suggest that the ball did not move so quickly but the direction of the ball meant it was difficult to stop it. An unfortunate way to concede a goal for Chelsea e...