This Week: Leapfrogs and butting heads

Hello my name’s Jack and welcome to the weekly round-up called This Week on Premier Skills English.

In This Week, we’ve got lots of interesting words and phrases to help you talk about football in English.

If you are listening to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify you can also visit the Premier Skills English website at britishcouncil.org/premierskillsenglish where you’ll be able to download the podcast.

This week, I’ve got two stories for you and 8 items of vocabulary. I’m going to talk about Newcastle’s match against Wolverhampton Wanderers and Aston Villa’s trip down to the London Stadium to face West Ham.

The words and phrases from the stories that I’m going to talk about this week are: to leapfrog, survival, impressive, to trickle, to butt heads, intense, to concede a penalty and tempers boiled over.

But before I get to this week’s stories, I want to give you the answer to last week’s football phrase. If you didn’t hear it last week, here’s one more chance to guess now.

Last week’s football phrase was to ****** *** * ****. There are two parts of this phrase. The first part means to be ok with something happening, even though it wasn’t what you really wanted. So if you’re trying to do something but you can’t quite do it, you may have to accept something that’s less than you had originally wanted. And the second part is what you call the result of a game when both sides score the same number of goals.

Congratulations to Denis2000 from Belarus, you were first again Denis2000. Well done to Hasan from Turkey, Vietnguyenngo from Vietnam, Pouyasharifi from Belgium, Tom Nguyen from Vietnam, Welcome to Premier Skills English Tom. Congratulations Shikabala, you got half the phrase right and finally... congratulations to Cezario Abrantes from Brazil. You all worked out that the phrase I was looking for was to settle for a draw.

Thanks to everyone who completed the task last week. I really enjoyed reading your humiliating stories. Only Shikabala was happy to share a story of their own humiliation so thanks for that Shikabala. You also asked an interesting question about the way I pronounce words like teacher and car and are, however and where. So ... some dialects of English are rhotic. People who speak rhotic dialects pronounce the r sound in words like teacher and car. They say teacheR and caR. My accent is non-rhotic so I only pronounce the r at the end of a word if the next word starts with a vowel sound. So I say car - with no r but when I say car alarm, you can hear the r sound connect to the word alarm - I say r_alarm, car alarm.
I used to tell my students that British English in not rhotic and American English is rhotic. But that’s not really true. I mean, it is mostly. But I used to live in Shropshire where the accent is rhotic. And in the south west, in Devon and Cornwall, where the stereotypical pirate accent comes from, people pronounce their rs. And in Scotland, people pronounce their rs. I’m not sure that the term British English is very accurate because as well as the different languages spoken in the UK, there are several defined dialects. However, if you read most online dictionaries you will see pronunciation guides for British and American English so I guess there are enough common differences to justify the term. I love travelling around the UK hearing the differences between british English dialects.

Do listen till the end of the podcast as there will be a new football phrase and task for you to complete after the stories and vocabulary.

Now it’s time for this week’s first story. When you listen, I’d like you to try to answer the following question:

How many teams are in danger of relegation?

Newcastle leapfrog Liverpool into fifth

Newcastle United scored their first Premier League win since mid January having lost two and drawn three of their previous five matches. The three points put them ahead of Liverpool and the Magpies will now have their sights set on 4th place Tottenham who are only four points ahead of them, but have played two matches more.

Newcastle scored the points through a late strike against Wolves who are in an incredible fight for survival with 8 other teams. Only five points separate Crystal Palace in 12th from bottom of the table Southampton.

Newcastle scored first on Sunday from an excellent free-kick from Kieran Trippier. Trippier perfectly placed the ball above the crowd of Newcastle and Wolves players for Alexander Isak who leaped high above his marker to score with a powerful header.

After scoring, Newcastle still looked dominant and were unlucky not to net again with several shots rattling off the woodwork and an impressive free-kick drawing an equally impressive save.

In the second half, Wolves started to look more dangerous and then a mistimed clearance that Nick Pope was diving for trickled into the path of Hwang Hee-chan who tapped the ball squarely into the open goal.

Miguel Almiron saved the win from the wing when he ran with the ball for half the pitch before crossing to Joe Willock. However, Almiron was not done and pointed to where he wanted the ball for Willock to return. Willock did as requested and set the Paraguayan up for the winning strike.

Final score: Newcastle United 2 - Wolverhampton Wanderers 1

Before the story, I asked you:

How many teams are in danger of relegation?

The answer is: Nine. We’ve still got a way to go so there are plenty of points available, but only five points separate the bottom 9 in the Premier League table.

The words from the story that I want to talk about are: leapfrog, survival, impressive and to trickle.

I like the word leapfrog. When I was a kid, leapfrogging was a sort of game where your friend would bend over so that their back was like a little platform. You would run up and put your hands on their back and jump over them using their back as a sort of springboard. When you do this, you have to open your legs wide so your legs look a bit like frogs legs. You can also leapfrog over other things like bollards and ... well, mostly bollards. Bollard is a strange word. It means a short post, usually made out of metal. You find bollards in towns that are there to stop cars. Anyhow, they are good for leapfrogging.

But that’s not what Newcastle did. You see, we also use the verb to say that someone has moved up a list, past someone else on the list. So last week, Newcastle were in 6th place and Liverpool were in 5th so Newcastle have leapfrogged past Liverpool into 5th place.

The next word that I want to talk about is survival. This is the noun formed from the verb to survive which means to continue to live or exist, usually after being in a difficult situation. The literal meaning is quite grim. You might hear about people surviving after a disaster or in a conflict or after getting very sick. When a plane crashes, the news always reports the number of survivors if there are any. To survive in the Premier League means to stay in the league at the end of the season. Teams that are relegated don’t survive. I used the noun form survival in the phrase fight for survival which means the competition to stay in the Premier League.

The adjective impressive is used to say that you think something is really good. You admire it and think it’s better than you had expected. The verb to impress means to surprise someone by performing better than they had expected. So, I am always impressed when my students find clever ways of using the language I’ve been teaching. For example, this week, Shikabala managed to use lots of vocabulary from recent podcasts in their task. I was very impressed. I described Trippier’s free kick as impressive. I didn’t say it was Trippier, but it was. It was from a distance and was struck with power and was really well placed. Trippier is known for his free kicks, but still, it was better than I had expected and I was impressed. It was impressive.

The last word from the story that I want to talk about is to trickle. Normally, we use this verb to describe small amounts of water or liquid that’s moving. So a river flows.

If a liquid flows, there needs to be a large amount of moving liquid that moves, kind of, powerfully or at least without slowing or stopping. A trickle is almost the opposite. It’s a really small amount of liquid. So you might say that a very small stream trickles or if you turn off a tap in your bathroom almost all the way, you can reduce the flow of water to a trickle. We use the word in football English to describe the movement of the ball if it’s struck without much force. You might hear a commentator say that the ball just trickled over the line, meaning that the ball rolled over the line quite slowly.

Now it’s time for this week’s second story. When you listen, I’d like you to try to answer the following question:

Who worked hard for West Ham?

Villans and Hammers butt heads in London

When Aston Villa travelled to the London Stadium on Sunday to take on West Ham, it was on the back of two wins that saw them claw their way out of the relegation zone. Now sitting in the relative safety of 11th place, the battle below is heating up as an incredible 9 teams struggle to stay in the Premier League. West Ham is one of those teams.

The competition this season is intense and West Ham and Aston Villa were well matched. Both teams scored early on, with Ollie Watkins starting things off for the visitors with a header. Alex Moreno played a long cross that Watkins redirected into the net in a beautifully smooth move.

Not long after that, following an intense series of blocks and rebounds, Leon Bailey turned and collided with Lucas Paquetá, bringing him down in the area and conceding a penalty. Saïd Benrahma converted the penalty with confidence and the scores were level.

Benrahma worked his socks off for a second goal throughout the match, racking up 10 attempts on goal, 4 of which went very close to putting the home side ahead.

As the minutes ticked by, the feelings of frustration grew on both sides and tempers came close to boiling over, but in the end, both teams got the result they deserved.

Final score: West Ham United 1 - Aston Villa 1

Before the story, I asked you:

Who worked hard for West Ham?

The answer is: Saïd Benrahma. He played a fantastic match and was unlucky not to have scored again.

The phrases and words from the story that I want to talk about are: to butt heads, intense, to concede and tempers boiled over.

To butt heads means to argue vigorously with someone. Usually, if we talk about people butting-heads, we’re talking about people that really don’t get on and who always find reasons to argue. You probably know people at work who just can’t get on and are always finding ways to argue with each other. I think that the idea comes from animals like goats that fight by head-butting. To head-butt means to hit someone with your head. When goats fight ... erm ... for territory? I don’t know why goats fight, but when they do, they hit each other with their heads. So when two people butt heads, it’s like they are goats, fighting to be the top goat. Similarly, we use the phrase locking horns which means to begin a fight or argument about something. To lock horns, I think, comes from how cows fight. We use lock horns to talk about a spirited or enthusiastic argument. When people butt heads, the people are seen as more stubborn and perhaps fighting for position rather than to achieve a goal.

The adjective intense means very strong. We usually use it to describe qualities like cold or pain. If you taste something that has a really strong flavour, you can say that the flavour is intense. We use the adjective intense with work to say a job needs high levels of concentration. I think that an air traffic controller’s job must be quite intense. Working in a high stress environment is intense. We also use the adjective to describe people who have very strong feelings about things. There is a cliche about intense young men who take everything way too seriously. In the story, I said that the competition in the Premier League this season is intense, meaning that the competition is really strong.

The verb to concede is quite common in football English. If a team concedes a goal, the other team scores against them. So when one team scores a goal, the other team is said to concede a goal. So to concede means to let something happen that you don’t want to happen. It’s not really letting something happen, it’s more like accepting or admitting something bad happened. As well as goals, teams don’t want to give away penalties or corner kicks so when this happens, you can say that the team concedes a penalty and concedes a corner. Outside of football, we use the word in the same way. If a company releases a new product that doesn’t sell, they might concede that the product is a failure.

The last phrase I want to talk about today is tempers boiled over. The noun temper is quite hard to explain. The verb form, to temper means to control or moderate. If you are at work and your boss announces a plan that you think will not work, that you think will be a total disaster, you might want to say: That’s stupid! That plan will never work. But saying that might upset your boss so it’s a good idea to temper your response and control and moderate your feelings and say something like: that’s a very interesting idea, but I’m not sure it will work.

The noun temper is a bit like your control. So if you lose your temper, you become angry and stop controlling what you are saying. I said that tempers boiled over. The verb to boil describes liquid becoming a gas, though we’re almost always talking about water. You need to boil water to make a cup of tea. If you are boiling an egg, you put water in a pan and put it on a stove so that the water heats up and boils. If it boils over, the bubbles formed when the water boils expand and flow over the rim of the pan. So the phrase tempers boiled over describes people’s emotions. As people become more and more emotional, usually angry, when they reach breaking point and people lose their temper and start shouting or fighting, their tempers have boiled over.

OK, that's 8 words and phrases from the stories today. The words and phrases were: to leapfrog, survival, impressive, to trickle, to butt heads, intense, to concede a penalty and tempers boiled over.

Listen to the stories one more time to hear the words and phrases in context.

Right, now it’s time for you to think about the language again.

Your challenge this week is to complete the gaps in the following sentences with the correct forms of the words and phrases that I’ve spoken about in this podcast. I have taken all of these sentences from news websites and edited them slightly.

Number 1. A cross to the back post found the heel of Jazz Younger, whose effort __________ into the bottom corner giving the Blues a late lead.

Number 2. The Match of the Day host tweeted: "An incredibly __________ young man and a wonderful footballer. Congratulations @BukayoSaka87."

Number 3. The 2018 world player of the year ___________ ex-England star Jonny Wilkinson into second place in the standings during last month’s win over France

Number 4. The two consultants were often _____________ as they struggled to agree on a style and vision, resulting in mixed feedback from the senior managers.

Number 5. The Blues seemed to be on course for a second Champions League final, but then they _________ a couple of sloppy goals and the dream ended.

Number 6. Global warming is going to cause more ___________ droughts and wet periods, which affects people, the economy, and agriculture around the world.

Number 7. Farmers have warned that new supermarket fees could risk the ________ of their businesses.

Number 8. Liverpool and Everton stars had to be held back from scrapping as _____________ on Monday night.

Leave your answers to the language challenge in the comments section on the Premier Skills English website.

Now it’s time for this week’s task. One of my colleagues has just started a job in a country where football is massive and he suggested that I make podcasts about football and different countries. So I’ve been giving it some thought and have some sentences that I’d like you to complete. I’m going to share these each week but I’d really love to read responses from as many different countries as possible. I’ve got an easy one for you to get started. Can you please complete this sentence in the comments section on the page for this podcast on Premier Skills English?

The thing I love most about football is ...
The thing I love most about football is ...

Share your ideas in the comments section on the page for this podcast on Premier Skills English and hopefully at some point in the future, I’ll be able to make a podcast about football and your country.

Now it’s time for this week's football phrase.

This week’s football phrase is ********** ****. This is the name for the bottom three places in the league table. This is an unfortunate place for a team to be because at the end of the season the teams in these positions won’t play in the Premier League in the following season.

If you know the answer, be sure to leave it in a comment on the page for this podcast on Premier Skills English.

Before I finish, I am going to go through the answers to last week’s language challenge.

Number 1. Lots of students were noticing a decline in wellness because of COVID so a group of students took the initiative to try to introduce more wellness activities.

Number 2. Things are looking up for the Toffees since the arrival of the former Burnley manager but they remain in the bottom three on goal difference.

Number 3. A group of young footballers are planning to take on an epic Premier League challenge to visit all 20 club grounds in 24 hours to raise money for charity.

Number 4. One Sheffield United fan reflected on a momentous match 30 years ago: “They had all these players, like Teddy Sheringham and Darren Anderton... a lot of internationals, and we took them apart.”

Number 5. The ex-Liverpool star who now works as a TV pundit made a cheeky dig at his colleague who used to play for Manchester United.

Number 6. It looks like the retired commentator is coming back to the commentary box for one more match.

Number 7. Formula 1 drivers are thought to have reflexes that are three times faster than the average person.

Number 8. When the manager was asked when the defender would be back from injury, he replied. It’s not looking good at the moment. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Number 9. There was an appeal for a penalty when the midfielder made his way into the penalty area and was brought down by a clumsy challenge.

And that’s all I have time for today. Before I finish, I just wanted to say that I hope you found this podcast useful, and I hope all of you stay fit and healthy and safe.

Bye for now and enjoy your football.