Podcast 44 - The Cruyff Turn

Rich: Hello my name’s Rich and welcome to this week’s Premier Skills English podcast.

Jack: Hi everyone. I’m Jack and every week we talk about football and help you with your English.

Rich: This week, we’re going to talk about one of the greatest ever players from Europe, the latest news from the Premier League and the language focus is on words we use to show how someone to do something.

Jack: And later, Rich will make this week’s Premier League prediction and we have another football word for you to guess in our football vocabulary game.

Rich: Yes, people liked the football game we did last week. Quite a few of you made guesses and also set our listeners challenges of their own. I think from now on we’ll do one football word or phrase a week, what do you think, Jack?

Jack: Yes, that sounds good. Shall we look at last week’s answers?

Rich: Quite a few of you got some of the words right. Elghoul from Algeria, AssemJuve from UAE, Liubomyr from Ukraine and HassanRaja447 from Pakistan all got some of the words right but it was only Nikosonris from Ukraine who worked out all four of the words. Well done Nikosonris!

Jack: Yes, well done to him, a couple of the words were quite tricky. So, what were the answers then?

Rich: Have you forgotten already?

Jack: I remember mine. My phrase was park the bus which means to defend for 90 minutes with all 11 men. As HassanRaja447 said it was a phrase used by Jose Mourinho to describe other teams defending against them. What was your phrase, Rich?

Rich: It was ‘football is a game of two halves’. It’s a real cliche and isn’t meant only in a literal way, that we have two halves of 45 minutes, but that each half is, or can be, very different from each other.

Jack: Yes, commentators use this a lot. And your word was dummy, wasn’t it?

Rich: Yes, I always think playing a dummy shows that a player is intelligent and has awareness of things happening around him. If you let the ball go through your legs and there isn’t another player there you can look a bit stupid.

Jack: Yes, knowing where your teammates are is very important. I like this word ‘awareness’ it means - to know that something exists, that something is there. So, a footballer needs to know where his teammates are on the pitch, he needs to have this awareness.

Rich: But, we use it outside of football, too. We can speak about environmental awareness - that it’s important for people to know about what is good and bad for our planet.

Jack: Yes, things like recycling things and reducing the amount of things we use are very important. And my final word was hat-trick. I thought his was going to be easy but in the end I think it was quite ….tricky for you to answer. A hat-trick of course is when a player scores 3 goals in a match.

Rich: If you wrote a different football word or phrase, have a look at the comments section in last week’s podcast and you can tell us if our answers are correct or not.

Jack: Shall we tell everyone this week’s football word now?

Rich: No, I think that’s enough football vocabulary for now, let’s move on to this week’s football news.

Jack: There weren’t any Premier League matches last weekend. Do we have any Premier League news.

Rich: You’re right, but lots of Premier League players were in action for their countries all over the world.

Jack: And Leicester City’s international players took their good form back home. Riyad Mahrez scored for Algeria in a 6-1 win against Ethiopia, Shinji Okazaki scored for Japan against Afghanistan, and Jamie Vardy scored his first international goal for England against Germany in a 3-2 win.

Rich: And what a goal it was. Vardy’s season just gets better and better. Did you see it?

Jack: It was brilliant. A back-heel flick, I think it’s the best goal I’ve seen this season. All these Leicester players scoring for their countries will give them lots of confidence for the Premier League run-in.

Rich: Run-in, that’s a word we see a lot at this time of the season. It means the last few games of the season for the teams fighting for the title. You often hear the ‘title run-in’ or just the ‘run-in’. It’s informal because I couldn’t find it in a dictionary but if you google it it’s used by a lot of newspapers.

Jack: Yes, it will give those players some confidence but Tottenham’s players are ready for the run-in, too. Eric Dier scored the winner in that game against Germany and Harry Kane scored a special goal, too.

Rich: Yes, some people said that he did a ‘Cruyff turn’ before he scored. And after the match Kane spoke about the goal and Johan Cruyff, who died last week at the age of 68.

Jack: Kane said that it was very sad news about Cruyff and that it was nice to do a Cruyff turn and score a goal.

Rich: Yes, many people have been talking about Cruyff this week and paying their respects. I think most people agree that he was one of the best, if not the best, European player ever.

Jack: And not many players have got a football action named after them. In fact, I can’t think of any other player that has an action named after him.

Rich: I have to be honest, but I’m never sure what a Cruyff turn is. What is a Cruyff turn and how do we do it?  

Jack: Right, Rich has been doing a bit of research and finding out what a Cruyff turn is. Haven’t you, Rich?

Rich: Yes, I’ve been practising them in my garden with zero success! So, instead we’re going to explain what a Cruyff turn is and then we’re going to look at some of the language of explaining how to do something.

Jack: I want everyone to imagine this situation in your heads. I want you to close your eyes and try to see what we say. You are the player with the ball. We’ll speak quite slowly and when we’ve finished, have a look at the video below/link on the side of the page to see if what you imagined is similar to the instructions you follow here.

Rich: First of all, let’s think about the situation. Imagine that you have the ball at your feet and a defender is coming to tackle you.

Jack: The first thing you do is pull back your right foot and make it look like you are going to pass the ball to another player. This is a type of dummy because you are not going to do this.

Rich: Then what you do is, you kick the ball softly with your right foot and you move it behind your left leg.

Jack: When you’ve done this, spin about 180 degrees, towards the defender and start running away from him with the ball.

Rich: The defender runs the opposite way and looks a bit silly because he thought you were going to kick the ball in that direction. You now have some space to run into.

Jack: Right, OK. You can open your eyes now. Did you follow the instructions OK? Pause the podcast and have a look at the video of Cruyff Turn. Is it the same as what was in your head?

Rich: That was fun. In my head, I’m now running down the pitch to score the winning goal for Liverpool against Borussia Dortmund next week!

Jack: We used quite a lot of language for giving instructions there. The first thing I notice is that we often use the imperative when giving instructions. The imperative is the infinitive without ‘to’. So, Rich said: ‘kick the ball softly’ and ‘move it behind your left leg’ and I said ‘spin about 180 degrees’.

Rich: We use the imperative for all types of instructions. We could tell people how to make a cake using verbs like ‘use’, ‘mix’, ‘pour’ and ‘heat’.

Jack: Or how to change a tyre on a car using verbs like ‘put’, ‘raise’, ‘take off’ and ‘put on’.

Rich: The other thing I noticed was how we link the different instructions together. To begin you said ‘the first thing you do is’ but you can also say things like ‘first of all’, ‘firstly’ or ‘to start with’.

Jack: To link the different steps together we use linking words like: ‘next’, ‘then’, ‘after this’. We might say ‘firstly’ at the beginning but we don’t usually say ‘secondly’ or ‘thirdly’ it doesn’t sound very natural. It’s better to say something like ‘then what you do is’ or ‘when you’ve done this’.

Rich: Right, that brings us to our questions for this week. Question 1: Was Johan Cruyff the best European player ever? Who is the best ever player from each continent? Who is the best ever player from your country?

Jack: Question 2: Johan Cruyff had a football action named after him. Can you think of anybody in or out of football that has had an action named after them?

Rich: Question 3: We tried to tell you how to perform a Cruyff Turn. Can you tell us how to do something? It can be anything you want but try to use the imperative and linking words when you are describing the steps.

Jack: And remember, if you want us to correct your comments just write ‘correct me’ at the beginning of your message.

Rich: We said that we would give you another football word or phrase to guess this week. Have you got one, Jack?

Jack: Yes, I do. Alright, this week, I’m going to do a phrase. The phrase is a bullet header. It’s a type of goal that is scored with the head but it’s not a normal headed goal because this type of headed goal is very, very powerful. To make it sound more powerful and faster we use the thing you put in a gun to describe it. Last weekend, Tottenham’s Eric Dier scored a bullet header to win the match against Germany.

Rich: Nice phrase Jack. I really like those herders that give the goalkeeper absolutely no chance!

Jack: Have you got a prediction this week, Rich?

Rich: Right, yes. This weekend the big match in the Premier League is Liverpool v Tottenham. Spurs have to win if they want to keep up the pressure on Leicester at the top. Liverpool have a small chance of finishing in the top four but they might be thinking about their match against Borussia Dortmund a few days later. I think Spurs will win this one with Kane on the scoresheet again. Final score: Liverpool 1-2 Tottenham.

Jack: Right, anyway that’s it for today - we’ve run out of time! Thanks for listening. And don’t forget to write your answers to our questions, your predictions and anything you want to say about the website or football English in the comments below.

Rich: Don’t forget if you sign in, you can score points to see if you can get your club, your country and your name to the top of our leaderboard.

Jack:  Bye for now and enjoy your football!