In this football language podcast for learners of English, we look at some of the words and phrases from the recent 2022 World Cup play off game between Wales and Ukraine. We use a BBC report on the game to discuss the phrases, ‘against the run of play‘; ‘to edge‘; ‘to fall short‘ and ‘inadvertently head in‘. You can also read the transcript for this podcast below, while you can also check out our glossary of footballing phrases here and visit our site to access all our previous posts and podcasts. If you have any suggestions or questions then you can contact us at [email protected].

Learn English Through Football Podcast: 2022 World Cup Qualifier Wales Edge Ukraine

DF: Hello again everyone and welcome to Languagecaster.com – the football-language podcast for learners of English who love the beautiful game of football. I’m Damian and I’m here in a really warm and sunny London and I’m one half of the languagecaster team, the other member of course is Damon who’s based in Tokyo, in Japan. Now, on today’s football-lanuage podcast we look back at some of the words and phrases from the World Cup qualifier between Wales and Ukraine taken from a BBC report, including ‘against the run of play‘; ‘to edge‘; ‘to fall short‘ and ‘inadvertently head in‘.

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Edge

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This was the title of the report and uses the verbs ‘to edge‘ and ‘to end‘ to describe the Welsh victory. So, if a team edges another team it means that they have beaten or qualified ahead of them but by a small or narrow margin. In this World Cup play-off, Wales won 1-0 but Ukraine were a little unlucky – the game was close – it could have gone either way so we say that Wales edged Ukraine. Sometimes we can also hear that a team has edged out another team or edged past them and both of these have similar meanings. Now the title also used the verb ‘to end‘ and here the BBC report says that Wales have finally reached the World Cup after 64 years; they have ended their wait; they have ended their 64-year wait; they have ended their 64-year World Cup wait.

Fall short

To fall short means that someone has not quite reached their goal – they were close but still failed. In this example, Ukraine’s goal (or aim) was to qualify for the 2022 World Cup but they lost to Wales, albeit rather unluckily, and so we can say that they fell short. Like Wales they had only ever qualified for one previous World Cup (in 2006) – t...