Newspaper Headline: Players Dig Deep for NHS

Newspaper Headline – Players Dig Deep for NHS

This headline is taken from the Times newspaper (April 3rd 2020) and reports on the story that Premier League players are going to donate some of their salaries to the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. The verbal phrase, ‘to dig deep‘ means to try really hard to do something even though it might be difficult to do and we featured this phrase back in 2016 to describe a team giving everything to prevent another side from beating them. There is another meaning of this phrase and this is connected to financially supporting someone or something – to dig deep into your pockets means to try and find some more money in order to do something. So here the Premier League players are going to find some money in order to give it to the NHS. The NHS is the publicly funded health organisation in the UK and during the Covid 19 pandemic has been celebrated by the whole country.

This headline has some typical features of a newspaper headline – alliteration (when words begin with the same sounds); omission of articles (it doesn’t say ‘the players’ or ‘the NHS’ for example), suppression of terms (it is not necessary to mention that the story is about Premier League players as this is understood by readers – there is also an image of the Liverpol captain Jordan Henderson below the title), while it also uses the present form of the verb which is a typical way of telling a story in this type of writing. If we were to re-write the headline it might read something like, ‘Premier League footballers have decided to donate money to the NHS’.

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