In this week’s football language post we look at a headline from the Guardian newspaper about Liverpool’s easy 4-1 win over rivals Everton. You can see more newspaper headlines here and don’t forget we have hundreds more explanations of football language in our football glossary. If you have questions or comments about this or any other phrase then email us at: admin@languagecaster.com.
Newspaper Headlines: Demolition Derby
In this week’s newspaper headline we look at a headline from The Guardian newspaper about this week’s Merseyside derby. Liverpool easily defeated their city rivals Everton 4-1 and the headline uses the alliterative (same sounds on both words) noun phrase ‘demolition derby‘ to explain how easy it was for Liverpool and how bad it was for Everton. Now the phrase ‘demolition derby‘ is used to describe a show where cars deliberately crash into each other and maybe we can think of Everton’s poor performance as a type of car crash? To demolish something is to completely destroy something and so in the derby we can see that Everton were completely destroyed by their city rivals.
Salah leads Liverpool rout of sorry Everton
The sub-heading adds more information about the game and starts with a focus on Liverpool striker Salah who scored a brace (two goals). To lead a rout of another team means that he was the main player in the heavy defeat of Everton – a rout is the same as a thrashing. It is a Liverpool rout of Everton so Liverpool did the routing of Everton; Everton were routed. There is also an adjective to describe Everton’s performance – sorry – which means it is very poor indeed. So, we could paraphrase the headline by saying that Liverpool striker Mo Salah helped his side to heavily defeat a poor Everton side in the derby.
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