Learn English Through Football Podcast: 2022 World Cup Qualifier Wales Edge Ukraine

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In this football language podcast for learners of English, we look at some of the words and phrases from the recent 2022 World Cup play off game between Wales and Ukraine. We use a BBC report on the game to discuss the phrases, ‘against the run of play‘; ‘to edge‘; ‘to fall short‘ and ‘inadvertently head in‘. You can also read the 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 or questions then you can contact us at admin@languagecaster.com.

Learn English Through Football Podcast: 2022 World Cup Qualifier Wales Edge Ukraine

DF: Hello again everyone and welcome to Languagecaster.com – the football-language podcast for learners of English who love the beautiful game of football. I’m Damian and I’m here in a really warm and sunny London and I’m one half of the languagecaster team, the other member of course is Damon who’s based in Tokyo, in Japan. Now, on today’s football-lanuage podcast we look back at some of the words and phrases from the World Cup qualifier between Wales and Ukraine taken from a BBC report, including ‘against the run of play‘; ‘to edge‘; ‘to fall short‘ and ‘inadvertently head in‘.

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Edge

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This was the title of the report and uses the verbs ‘to edge‘ and ‘to end‘ to describe the Welsh victory. So, if a team edges another team it means that they have beaten or qualified ahead of them but by a small or narrow margin. In this World Cup play-off, Wales won 1-0 but Ukraine were a little unlucky – the game was close – it could have gone either way so we say that Wales edged Ukraine. Sometimes we can also hear that a team has edged out another team or edged past them and both of these have similar meanings. Now the title also used the verb ‘to end‘ and here the BBC report says that Wales have finally reached the World Cup after 64 years; they have ended their wait; they have ended their 64-year wait; they have ended their 64-year World Cup wait.

Fall short

To fall short means that someone has not quite reached their goal – they were close but still failed. In this example, Ukraine’s goal (or aim) was to qualify for the 2022 World Cup but they lost to Wales, albeit rather unluckily, and so we can say that they fell short. Like Wales they had only ever qualified for one previous World Cup (in 2006) – they just fell short of making or qualifying for a second tournament.

Against the run of play/Inadvertently headed in

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Against the run of play is a fairly common expression in football and is used when one side is playing better than the other but still manages to concede a goal. In this game, Ukraine had started the game really well and were attacking the Welsh goal quite a lot but then from a free kick they conceded – it was against the run of play as they had been playing better than Wales when they let in the goal.

The winning goal for Wales was an own goal – it was scored by Ukraine’s captain into his own net. Of course, he didn’t mean to score this goal so that’s why the word ‘inadvertently‘ is used – he didn’t intend to score the goal. The ball from Bale went into the box (the danger area) and Yarmolenko had wanted to clear the ball by heading it away but instead he headed it in to his own net – to head in means to score a goal with the head.

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Contact

Now, if you want to ask any football-language questions or simply say hello then you can do so by adding a comment on our site, or by using our forum – we have had some great questions recently on phrases such as ‘in the pund seast’ and ‘not at the races‘ . You can also send an email to us at admin@languagecaster.com and you can also look out for us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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Goodbye

DB: Yes, you are listening to languagecaster and that message was in Welsh and we’d love to hear from anyone else who might like to share this message, ‘you are listening to Languagecaster.com‘. We are trying to see if we can get all 32 of the competing nations at the World Cup so we’d love to hear from you. And don’t forget that there’s a transcript to this podcast and lots of vocabulary support which you can access by coming along to our site here at languagecaster – a great resource for those learning and teaching the language.

OK, that’s it for this short football-language podcast in which we looked back at some of the language from the 2022 World Cup play-off between Wales and Ukraine. We looked at the phrases, ‘against the run of play‘; ‘to edge‘; ‘to fall short‘ and ‘inadvertently head in‘. We’ll be back soon with more football language so until then enjoy all the football. Bye bye.

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