Archive for November, 2009

We start off this week’s predictions with the Asian Champions League final – as football increases in popularity in Asia this competition is going to get a bigger and bigger profile. Staying in Asia, we have a crunch game for the leaders of J-league, then some big games involving some the front runners in England, France and Spain, before we go south to a basement battle in Argentina. Our guest predictor this week is Michel who is a Lyon fan.

South American football, success in Europe for France, a rather strange newspaper campaign from the UK and a really bad week for Liverpool and Tottenham all feature on this week’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly section of languagecaster’s podcast. Vocabulary support can be found for the words in bold at the foot of the post.

Good

It has been a great week for French clubs in the Champions League with Marseilles thrashing FC Zurich 6-1, Bordeaux winning away at Bayern Munich and Lyon qualifying for the knock-out stages after drawing with Liverpool 1-1. Bordeaux’s win was particularly impressive as many had been tipping Bayern to do well in this season’s Champions League but Laurent Blanc’s side now look odds-on to make the the next round after completing the double over Van Gaal’s team. continue

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On this main report, languagecaster takes a look at a team from the CONCACAF region that has qualified for the 2010 World Cup – Honduras. The transcript of the report is below.

Listen to the main report here

Transcript

First a few facts and stats about Honduras. The capital is Tegucigalpa and the country has a population of roughly eight million people. Conquered by Spain in the early 16th century, who found large deposits of gold and silver, Honduras had previously had a rich Mayan culture. It became fully independent in 1938.

The country sits just north of the equator and is bordered by Guatemala on the west, El Salvador to the southwest, and by Nicaragua to the southeast. At 112,000 square kilometers, Honduras is continue