Learn English Through Football

In this short football language podcast we look at some of the language from the BBC report on the 2021 Europa League Final between Manchester United and Villareal. You can read a transcript for this podcast below, 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 Europa League Final
DF: Hello everyone, this is Damian from the Learning English Through Football team. I hope we are all doing well. I am in a sunny London – it’s been raining in the UK for the past three weeks so it’s great to finally see some sun! Now as regular listeners of the show will know, the other member of the Languagecaster.com team, Damon is based in Tokyo but it will just be me today although you can hear him in a recent post that came out earlier this week on the new 2021 Premier League champions Manchester City.
Now on this short football language podcast we look at some of the words and phrases from a BBC report on the 2021 Europa League final between Manchester United and Villareal which saw the Spanish side win their first ever trophy – well done to them. We look at three different parts of the report – descriptions of the two goals and an overall summary of the game which usually appears at the start of a sports report. Don’t forget that you can read the transcript for this podcast by coming along to our site here at languagecaster.com.
Stinger: You are listening to languagecaster.com (in French).
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DF: OK, let’s see how the BBC opened their report – they did this by providing a one-sentence summary of the game, including the result, the teams, the venue, the main protaganist (that’s the main character) and how the result came about.  There are two parts to the sentence. The first one uses the verb ‘failed‘ to describe the Manchester United’s goalkeeper David de Gea’s miss in the penalty shootout at the end of the final; remember that a penalty shootout occurs when both sides are still drawing with each other after 90 minutes and then 30 minutes of extra time and this shoot out takes place to decide the winners – to try and break the deadlock. The shootout in this report is described as a ‘marathon’ which means that it went on for a long time (11 penalties for each side) as of course the marathon is the longest running race in the Olympics. The second part of the sentence uses the verb ‘dashed‘ to describe how Villareal de...