Football Language – In the News: Manchester City 4-0 Liverpool 2020: In this short football language podcast we discuss some of the football language connected with a match in the news. The match we focus on is Manchester City’s 4-0 win against newly crowned Champions Liverpool. If you have questions or comments, email us at: admin@languagecaster.com (Damon=DB).
Football Language – In the News: Manchester City 4-0 Liverpool 2020
DB: Hello football fans. You are listening to languagecaster.com. Hi there! My name is Damon, one half of the language caster team and on this short podcast, I’ll be talking about some of the football language – cliches and phrases – surrounding the mid-week game between Manchester City versus Liverpool. In this game, Man City thrashed the new Champions Liverpool 4-0, so there were plenty of reports on the back pages!
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OK, let’s start this look at the football language connected with Man City’s 4-0 win over Liverpool with the cliche ‘they wanted it more‘. Many pundits were surprised at how easy it was for Manchester City to win by four goals to nil, and used this common cliche – they wanted it more – to imply that Liverpool didn’t show enough desire, hinting that they were not motivated enough. This phrase means the opposition had more passion than the losing team; the losing team’s players didn’t put enough effort or fight into their performance.
Many pointed to the fact that Liverpool had just walked the title as a reason for their rather poor performance. When a team is so much stronger than the rest of the league, we say that they are dominant – they have dominated the rest of the league. If they go on to easily win the league title then we can say that they have walked the title, and this is what Liverpool have done in 2020. Even losing to Manchester City, they are still 20 points ahead.
Another cliche
Some people suggested that the game could have been different if Liverpool had scored one of their early chances. The argument is that goals change games. This is a fantastic cliche. Of course, more often than not, goals have an impact on a game, they can change a game. The cliche is usually used when talking about imagining a situation when a goal wasn’t scored, and talking about how the game would have been different. One goal that may have changed the Man City v Liverpool game was the first, a penalty.
A lot of reports hinted that it was a soft penalty.