Hello my name’s Jack and welcome to the weekly round-up called This Week on Premier Skills English.

In this week, we’ve got lots of interesting words and phrases to help you talk about football in English.

If you are listening to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify you can also visit the Premier Skills English website at britishcouncil.org/premierskillsenglish where you’ll be able to download the podcast.

On the Premier Skills English website, you can read the transcript and join the Premier Skills English community by completing a language task in the comments section. This will really help you remember the new words and phrases from the stories from the Premier League.

Now as the new season hasn’t started yet, I am going to talk about the teams that are being promoted to the Premier League. These are AFC Bournemouth, Fulham Football Club and Nottingham Forest Football Club.

I spoke about Fulham Football Club last week and AFC Bournemouth the week before so today, I’m talking about Nottingham Forest Football Club..

In this focus on Nottingham Forest Football Club, I am going to use a range of B2 vocabulary that I will talk about more after the story. The words from the story that I’m going to talk about are: volunteer, campaign, technically, association, legend, evil, cheer on, and tricky.

Listen out for these words in the focus on Nottingham Forest Football Club.

But before that, I want to look at last week’s football phrase. If you didn’t hear it last week, here’s one more chance to guess now.

Football Phrase

Last week, I was looking for a phrase that means the games that teams play at this time of the year. The phrase also means that the matches are not part of any campaign, they are not cup or league matches. The phrase I was looking for was ***-****** **********.

So ... who got the right answer? Well, congratulations to Hsn from Turkey, Hayato from Japan, Tal1984b from Israel, Isshin from Japan, Daniel_06 from Mexico, Vietnguyenngo from Vietnam, Goku from Japan and Mehdi-Masoumi from Iran.

You all managed to work out, or almost, that the phrase I was looking for was pre-season friendlies.

OK, let’s get on with this week’s focus on Nottingham Forest Football Club.

A quick reminder of the language to listen out for ... The words are: volunteer, campaign, technically, association, legend, evil, cheer on, and tricky.

Nottingham Forest Football Club are back in the Premier League

Nottingham Forest Football Club is one of the oldest football clubs in England, founded in 1865. The club was founded by a group of shinty players who met in a pub in the centre of Nottingham and decided to play association football instead. At that same meeting, they also decided that they would play in Garibaldi Red, named after the Italian general who led the volunteer redshirts in campaigns in Italy and abroad.

Nottingham Forest has not played in the Premier League for over 20 years, but the club has been successful having played in the top two tiers of English football for all but five seasons since it joined the Football League in 1888. When I was growing up, Notts Forest were a big team. Forest have won the league title, before it was the Premier League, they have won the FA Cup twice, four League Cups, one FA Charity Shield, two European Cups, and one UEFA Super Cup. So it’s great to see them back in the Premier League.

Nottingham is a city located in the centre of England on the banks of the river Trent. Nottingham Forest football club is actually on the other side of the river which is technically in the town of West Bridgford. The city has a long history going back to the Norman conquest, but is probably best known for its association with the legend of Robin Hood who lived in the nearby Sherwood Forest and famously battled with the evil Sheriff of Nottingham.

Nottingham Forest are widely known simply as Forest, but the fans will cheer their team on using the nicknames The Garibaldis, The Reds and even The Tricky Trees. This last nickname dates back to some of the team’s earliest matches which were played near Sherwood Forest before they moved to the City Ground stadium by the river.

OK. Before I start the language focus, there’s one more word that I want to explain, but it’s not part of the language focus because it’s really low frequency in most of the UK and not something that you’re likely to have many conversations about. I said that Nottingham Forest Football Club was founded by a group of shinty players.

Shinty is a team game that’s a bit like hockey only the ball can be played in the air and the sticks are different. It is a Scottish game and these days it’s only really played in the Scottish Highlands, but it used to be played all over Scotland and Scottish migrants into England took the sport with them and so there were some teams like the one in Nottingham that switched to association football.

Language focus

OK. The following words from the focus on Nottingham Forest football club are mostly B2 and are all much more common and worth learning.

The first word is volunteer. A volunteer is a person who does something without being paid. They do it willingly. Often people volunteer to help out a charity. You can volunteer at a food bank or centre for homeless people, for example. Also, the word can be used as a verb. If there is a task to do at work that nobody likes to do, the manager might ask if anybody will volunteer to do the task. You can also make the adverb voluntarily. The suspect went to the police station voluntarily, he went to the police station of his own will, he wasn’t arrested and taken by the police.

The next word is campaign. This has come up a few times in the Premier Skills English podcast because of the football English meaning. In the focus on Nottingham Forest Football Club, I spoke about the Italian military leader Garibaldi who led campaigns in Italy and abroad. A campaign is a series of actions that are carried out, usually by a group of people, to achieve a result, to do something that the people in the campaign want to do. So in a war, a campaign will have objectives like, push back the enemy or capture a town or even defeat the enemy. We also use the word campaign to talk about football, about a team playing in a league. A team’s campaign is the series of actions, the matches that the team will play with the objective of winning or at least finishing as high as possible in the league.

The next word is an adverb. The word is technically. This is an advanced item and it’s used in a few ways, but the use I am interested in is to say that something is true if you follow the rules exactly. We use this when a more general interpretation of a situation might lead us to say something different. So Nottingham Forest Football Club is in Nottingham - I mean, that’s obvious, isn’t it? Well, technically, it’s in West Bridgeford as it’s on the other side of the river. So if you apply the rules exactly, it’s not in Nottingham, but everyone, well normal people would be happy to say that it’s in Nottingham. This adverb is often used by people who think they are a bit clever to correct people who say things that everyone agrees with even if they are technically wrong.

The word association is a noun with two main meanings. The most common is a group of people who work together or who meet and support one another for a particular purpose or because of a shared interest or a shared problem. So in the UK, The FA is the football association. The FA is the organisation that represents people who want to play football in the UK. The word association can also mean a connection between two or more things. The verb to associate means to connect things in your mind. Some associations are held by lots of people, for example foods associated with countries or famous characters associated with places. Nottingham is associated with Robin Hood, the famous outlaw from folk tales.

Robin Hood is a legendary figure. The stories about a heroic outlaw date back hundreds of years and may be based on characters who lead insurgencies against the Norman invaders of the 11th century. We don’t have any clear historic records and most of the details of the legend were created over hundreds of years as the stories were told and retold. These sorts of stories are called legends. Legends may be based on something that truly happened and they are told as if they are true, but there’s no historic record that could prove them or disprove them.

We also use the word legend to talk about sports stars of the past. In this use, the word legend refers to a person, though the word contains the idea that this person’s performance in their sport will be spoken about for years to come. I think that sports people are often legends for their clubs so you might hear someone described as an Arsenal legend or a Nottingham Forest legend.

The next word is evil and it means very bad, morally bad. It’s normally used to describe the very worst behaviour, the sorts of crimes against people that make normal people feel unwell. You sometimes hear judges describing the worst criminals as evil. It is probably used more commonly in a jokey way to talk about something that is very difficult, especially an exam question or some sort of test.

The next phrasal verb was the football phrase a few weeks ago. The phrase is to cheer on and it means to shout loudly to encourage or show support for someone or a team. This can be separable, you can cheer on your team or you can cheer your team on.
The last word from the focus on Nottingham Forest Football Club that I want to talk about is the adjective tricky. Tricky means difficult. If a task is tricky, you need to pay attention when you complete it. Tricky doesn’t just mean difficult, it implies that there is a trick, that the task might appear simple and then when you try to complete it, you discover that it is more difficult than it looks. So it means difficult but with a bit more to it, there has to be some challenge that is not obvious. Nottingham Forest’s nickname is the Tricky Trees. This implies that they are more difficult an opponent than they might appear at first. They are tricky, they might catch you out if you are not careful.

OK. That’s all the language I want you to think about today. The words were volunteer, campaign, technically, association, legend, evil, cheer on, and tricky. Listen to the focus on Nottingham Forest Football Club one more time to hear the words in context and after that, there will be a language challenge and this week’s football phrase.

Nottingham Forest Football Club are back in the Premier League

Nottingham Forest Football Club is one of the oldest football clubs in England, founded in 1865. The club was founded by a group of shinty players who met in a pub in the centre of Nottingham and decided to play association football instead. At that same meeting, they also decided that they would play in Garibaldi Red, named after the Italian general who led the volunteer redshirts in campaigns in Italy and abroad.

Nottingham Forest has not played in the Premier League for over 20 years, but the club has been successful having played in the top two tiers of English football for all but five seasons since it joined the Football League in 1888. When I was growing up, Notts Forest were a big team. Forest have won the league title, before it was the Premier League, they have won the FA Cup twice, four League Cups, one FA Charity Shield, two European Cups, and one UEFA Super Cup. So it’s great to see them back in the Premier League.

Nottingham is a city located in the centre of England on the banks of the river Trent. Nottingham Forest football club is actually on the other side of the river which is technically in the town of West Bridgford. The city has a long history going back to the Norman conquest, but is probably best known for its association with the legend of Robin Hood who lived in the nearby Sherwood Forest and famously battled with the evil Sheriff of Nottingham.

Nottingham Forest are widely known simply as Forest, but the fans will cheer their team on using the nicknames The Garibaldis, The Reds and even The Tricky Trees. This last nickname dates back to some of the team’s earliest matches which were played near Sherwood Forest before they moved to the City Ground stadium by the river.

Language Challenge

Right, now it’s time for you to think about the language again.

Here are 8 sentences with gaps in them and you have to complete the gaps with the words and phrases from this podcast.

Number 1: When I was a kid, I loved the _______ of King Arthur and his sword Excalibur
Number 2: He was an ____ dictator and was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people.
Number 3: Green is the colour of the environmental movement because of its ___________ with nature.
Number 4: The Cruyff Turn is a very _______ move. Whenever I try it, I fall over.
Number 5: People always say that ___________ a tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable.
Number 6: I went to the swimming gala to ______ __ my son who was racing in the 400m freestyle.
Number 7: We are working on a new advertising _________ nto try to persuade more people to visit the website.
Number 8: The charity would not be able to operate without the ________who work there.

Leave your answers in the comments section on the Premier Skills English website and I will go through them next week.

Football phrase

Now it’s time for this week’s football phrase.

The phrase is ***** ****. This is a phrasal verb and it means to recover quickly from something. If a team suffers a painful defeat you might hear a fan say, I’m sure they will ****** ****. Or perhaps a player suffers a minor injury, their manager might say that they are strong and that they will ****** **** in no time.
Here’s a clue the first part of this phrase is a verb and it describes what a ball does when it hits the ground.

If you know the phrase I’m looking for, please leave it in the comments section on the page for this podcast on the Premier Skills English website.

Very quickly, here are the answers to last week’s language challenge.

Number 1: I’m quite happy in my current job. I don’t want to change.
Number 2: Serena Williams was such a brilliant young player she turned professional when she was 14-years-old.
Number 3: There has always been an intense rivalry between the Manchester clubs.
Number 4: The office has moved and is now located right next to the library.
Number 5: Amazingly, it was an amateur photographer who won the wildlife photography competition.
Number 6: After a hard day at work, seeing my kids always cheers me up.
Number 7: Please make sure you submit your application before the deadline.
Number 8: The building work at the stadium will increase the capacity to over 50,000.

I hope you got them all right!

That’s all I have time for today. Before I finish, I just wanted to say that I hope you found this podcast useful, and I hope all of you stay fit and healthy and safe.

Bye for now and enjoy your football.