This Week: Seal the win

Hello my name is Jack and welcome to This Week, the weekly round-up of Premier League action on Premier Skills English where the focus is English vocabulary from the stories.

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.

On the Premier Skills English website, you can read the transcript and join the Premier Skills English community by completing a language task in the comments section. This will really help you remember new words and phrases from the stories from the Premier League.

Before we get to the stories, it’s time to announce the answer to last week’s football phrase. In case you missed it, listen to the football phrase one more time and see if you can guess the answer.

Football phrase

Congratulations to Hayato from Japan, 258963 from Vietnam, HSN from Turkey and Mehmet Sisman, also from Turkey. You all correctly guessed that the answer to last week’s football phrase was the top flight.

Keep listening to the end of the podcast as there will be a new football phrase for you to guess.

The words and phrases I’m looking at this week are: idolising, released, blossoming, a tactical genius, thriving, seal the win and local rivals.

Listen out for these phrases in the headlines and stories.

Dan Burn’s hometown return

Dan Burn grew up in the North-East of England, supporting Newcastle United and idolising Alan Shearer. When he was 9 years old, he signed for Newcastle United but was released aged 11 to play for local youth teams. Nearly 20 years later, Burn lined up at the back at St James’ Park to face Aston Villa and helped the Magpies secure a well needed win and put some distance between his club and the relegation zone.

The two items I want to look at from this story are: idolising and released.

The verb to idolise means to admire someone very much. It means to think that someone is an idol. If you idolise someone, you probably want to be like the person and try to act like them. In sports, this is quite common and normally a positive thing.

Dan Burn idolised Alan Shearer. He probably wanted to be able to play like him and copied his trademark goal celebration. As the Premier League’s leading goal scorer, he was a good person to idolise.

However, when you idolise someone, you tend to focus only on the positive aspects of the person, the aspects you admire and so can develop an unrealistic idea and sometimes people become a bit obsessed.

The second word I want to talk about is released. This is the past participle of the verb release which means to give freedom to someone or something. So it’s normally used when someone or something is trapped or held back or restrained in some way. When you open the trap or take away whatever is stopping the person or thing, you release them. In football, a player can be restricted by a contract.

Dan Burn signed a contract with Newcastle United when he was only 9 years old which meant he wasn’t free to play for other teams. When he was 11, he was released by Newcastle United and could go and play with other teams.

Let’s move on to the next story.

Gordon Shines for Lampard

20-year-old Anthony Gordon deserved his standing ovation when he was substituted at the end of the match against Leeds. Everton’s blossoming midfielder delighted the home crowd with an aggressive display and impressed manager Frank Lampard who said: “He can go a really long way in the game and his job now is to keep his head down and keep working,”

Gordon is enjoying Lampard’s leadership, describing the skipper as a tactical genius. Gordon said: “I am thriving off that. I’m learning from him every day.”

The three items I want to look at from this story are: blossoming, a tactical genius and thriving.

The verb to blossom usually describes flowers on trees. Blossom can be a noun and means the flowers on trees. Apple and cherry trees are famous for their blossom. In the spring, they blossom, they produce beautiful flowers and the flowers represent the stage of growth where the trees start producing fruit. If you say that a person is blossoming, it means that they have become more attractive or successful as they have grown into adulthood. It usually means they have become happier and stronger and more positive. For a young footballer, it means they are becoming more skilled and playing better and with more confidence.

A tactical genius is a great person to have as a manager. Tactical is and adjective that relates to the noun tactic. A tactic is a plan, a way of doing something. It’s most commonly used to talk about sports and the military.

A genius is a person with an incredible skill or ability or someone who is really really clever. I think there’s an IQ level that’s supposed to indicate that a person is a genius. Over 160, I think, but most people who are described as geniuses probably don’t know what their IQ is and are described as geniuses more simply, because of how well they can do something. Anthony Gordon described Frank Lampard as a tactical genius which means he thinks that Frank Lampard has an incredible skill at planning matches and tactics on the pitch.

The third word I want to look at is thriving. This is very similar to blossoming, but it doesn’t have to be about young people. Anybody can thrive. It means to become more successful, usually because someone is in a new situation. So you might hear that someone is thriving in a new job or perhaps a new class at school or even under a new manager.

Time to move on to the final story.

Caroline Weir seals WSL derby win for Manchester City

Caroline Weir has scored every time she has played in a home Manchester derby. It was no different this weekend when after 81 minutes, she sealed the win for City with a stunning chip in front of a club-record home crowd.

Weir’s goal earned Manchester City a 1-0 win and three points that could turn out to be crucial in the race for Champions League football. The win means City moves to within two points of local rivals Manchester United who sit in third.

The two items I want to look at from this story are: sealed the win and local rivals.

To seal something normally means to close a container of some kind so that nobody can open it, at least, not without breaking the seal. So, when food is packaged in glass jars, sometimes there is a little lump on the top of the lid that clicks when you press on it. When the jar is sealed in the factory, the clicky button is pushed in and doesn't click. So you can tell when you buy the jar if it is still sealed shut. If the seal has been broken and the clicky button can be pressed, then you should not buy the jar because it has been opened. In the olden days, people used wax seals on letters and had metal tools with their family crests on them that they would press into hot wax to leave an imprint. These wax imprints or seal were also used on documents, especially by kings and queens to show that they approved of the documents. So a royal seal formally approved an agreement. We use the verb these days to say that an agreement or deal has been approved or made certain. When Weir sealed the win, it was like she made the win certain. After her goal, it was clear that Manchester City was going to win. The rest of the match was just a formality because Caroline Weir had sealed the win.

A team’s local rivals are the team or teams that are from the same area , that are local. So local just means from the same area. My local shops are just down the road, I have two little local shops that I can walk to.

Your rivals are the people you compete with. You can have rivals at work, perhaps you are trying to get a promotion and you have colleagues that also want to get the same promotion. Or you can have love rivals, if more than one person falls in love with a third person, they may compete to attract the person they love. Or, and most commonly, you can have sporting rivals. These are people you compete against in sport.

So your local rivals are the people or teams that you compete against that are from the same town or area as you.

OK, so the vocabulary I looked at today was: idolising, released, blossoming, a tactical genius, thriving, seal the win and local rivals.

Listen to the headlines again to hear this language in context.

HEADLINES - REPLAY

Right, now I’m going to give you a chance to think about the language again.

I’m going to give you six sentences with gaps in them and you have to complete the gaps with the words and phrases I’ve spoken about in this podcast. You will have to work out what the word is and then you may have to transform it into the correct form for the sentence.

Number 1. Ryan didn’t really get on at school, but he _____________ when he went to college.

Number 2: Pete really _____________ his big brother when he was growing up.

Number 3: Sir Alex Ferguson was a _____________ and made Man Utd an unstoppable force.

Number 4: Everton always perform better when they are up against their _____________ .

Number 5: Lucy loves a challenge. I think she is going to _____________ in her new job.

Number 6: Robert was determined to turn his life around when he was _____________ from prison.

Number 7: Louise’s second goal really _____________ . There was no way they were going to come back after that.

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

Football Phrase

OK - our football phrase. So regular listeners will know that every week, we challenge you to work out a mystery football word or phrase.

The football phrase this week is * **** ** ****. This is what a team has when they have played one fewer matches than their competitors in a league. So, if a team is two points behind and they have * **** ** ****, they still have the chance to go ahead in the league.

If you know the answer to the football phrase, leave a comment on the podcast page for this podcast on the Premier Skills English website. If you have a football phrase that you would like us to use in the podcast, just get in touch and let us know.

Before I finish I just wanted to say that I hope you found this podcast and the vocabulary useful and I hope all of you stay fit and healthy.

Bye for now and enjoy your football.