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This week’s weekly football phrase is to feign.
- Find out more about this phrase by reading the transcript below and listening to the audio.
- You can also find many more examples of soccer vocabulary by going to our football cliches page here and our huge football glossary here.
- This post also features in our podcast show, along with a main report and our weekly predictions.
(to) Feign
The verb to feign means to pretend so when a player is pretending to be injured we say that he or she feigned an injury. It is also used to describe the movement of a player with the ball; when he or she pretends to go one direction but instead goes in another direction – it is similar in meaning to the verb ‘to dummy’. The verb to feign often collocates with a direction (left or right) so for instance you might hear a TV commentator say that a player has feigned right or feigned to the right, meaning that the player pretended to go right but actually moved to the left. In order to do this, the player may have dropped the shoulder, performed a step over or some other trick to try and get away from the opponent. To feign.
- Example: Messi feigned to go left and then attacked down the right side.
- Example: The player was booked for feigning an injury
