Premier Vocabulary is a mini-podcast for you to learn football English one word at a time. We have three different levels for you: easy, medium and hard.

This episode is easy so we’re looking at common football words and phrases. Things you use and need to know to play the game.

Summary

Learn more football vocabulary with Premier Skills English. Each lesson in our Premier Vocabulary section looks at one football word or phrase. This lesson looks at the phrase to break the offside trap.

You can find more lessons on the side of this page.

Transcript

Rich: Hello my name’s Rich and welcome to Premier Skills English - Premier Vocabulary.

Jack: Hi there! I’m Jack. We’re here to help you with your football English. Premier Vocabulary is a mini-podcast for you to learn football English one word at a time.

Rich: We have three different levels for you: easy, medium and hard.

Jack: This episode is hard so we’re looking at more difficult football phrases and idioms.

Rich: The phrase we are looking at in this episode is: to break the offside trap.

Jack: To break the offside trap. This is a football phrase we hear quite often.

Rich: We’re not going to explain the offside rule here. We’ve done that once in this series. It got a bit complicated.

Jack: Yeah, it’s one of those things that all football fans know but if you start to explain it in detail it gets more and more complicated.

Rich: But if you want to laugh at us trying to explain the offside rule have a listen to our easy episode offside. It’s our third easy lesson in this Premier Vocabulary series.

Jack: You can easily find all our old episodes on Apple Podcasts, Audioboom or on the Premier Skills English website where you’ll also find the transcripts in the words section.

Rich: So, we’re not going to explain offside right now but we are going to look at the phrase to break the offside trap.

Jack: So, we’re looking at the phrase to break the offside trap. To understand the full phrase we need to break it up a little bit.

Rich: Let’s speak about the offside trap. The offside trap is a tactic that a defending team uses to catch attacking players offside. All the defenders have to work together to make this work.

Jack: Defenders stay more or less in a line across the pitch and when they see an attacking player moving towards their goal all the defenders move towards the halfway line.

Rich: This means that the attacker will be in an offside position if someone plays a pass and a free-kick will be given to the defending team.

Jack: A trap is an object that is used to catch animals. A trap might be used by hunters to catch big animals or in your house, you might put a bit of cheese on a mousetrap to catch a mouse or a rat.

Rich: A bit of cheese? Does that really work? I use my cat. Anyway, the trap on the pitch is this defensive tactic we’ve been talking about and the animal is the attacker.

Jack: But sometimes an animal breaks the trap and escapes. When an attacker breaks the offside trap it means that the trap hasn’t worked. The defenders were not in the correct place on the pitch and the attacker runs forward to score. The attacker broke the offside trap.

Final whistle

Rich: There is the final whistle!

Jack: We’ll be back soon with more Premier Vocabulary from Premier Skills English.

Rich: Bye for now and enjoy your football.

Discuss

Is using an offside trap a good tactic?

Where do defenders need to be to set an offside trap?

Where do strikers need to be to break an offside trap?