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 hard so we’re looking at more difficult football phrases and idioms.

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 be meat and drink to someone.

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 be meat and drink to someone.

Jack: This is a strange phrase and is a cliche that has been used by football commentators many times; probably too many times.

Rich: The phrase is used to describe something that someone finds very easy to do because they have done it many times before. Have a listen to this example:

Jack: That kind of cross is meat and drink to a goalkeeper of this quality.

Rich: This means that it was a cross that was very easy for the goalkeeper to deal with. You can imagine it was a high, slow cross that the goalkeeper could catch easily.

Jack: Here’s another example:

Rich: Long balls in the air are meat and drink to lower league defences.

Jack: Here you can imagine a Premier League club unsuccessfully using long balls as a tactic against a team from a lower division.

Rich: Lower division clubs are usually more physical and are strong in the air so the Premier League team should use its superior skill on the ball and not just kick it long.

Jack: Because that’s meat and drink to lower league defences.

Rich: Exactly.

Jack: The phrase can also be used outside of football. Here are a couple of examples we found online.

Rich: Remember that the phrase meat and drink is being used to describe something that is easy to do when you’ve done it many times before.

Jack: The first five questions in the quiz were about football which was meat and drink to Brian.

Rich: Writing stories such as these are meat and drink to experienced journalists.

Jack: Working as a security guard was meat and drink to the former soldier.

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

Scoring goals is meat and drink to __________.