The weekly podcast is out - we look at the phrase 'literally', check out what's happening in Argentina and lots more.

Sunderland

Position 8th, 9-6-9 (33 points, +9 goal differential)

Home Record: 5-4-3, +8 goal differential

Recent Form: WLWWW

Last Meeting: Arsenal 2 Sunderland 1 (October 17, 2011)

Crucial match .

Football language quiz from languagecaster.com. This week is a review of our previous 4 quizzes!

How good is your football vocabulary? This is languagecaster.com's weekly football language review quiz with five questions for you to answer. During each week of the season check our twitter feed, read our posts, and learn phrases, cliches and words related to football, to help you answer the quiz.

It's easy to trot out cliches about yesterday's game - it was a great advert for the premier league, etc. - but the fact of the matter is that we lost. We may have lost heroically, and we can be proud of the performance, but we're still three further behind in terms of the race for Champions League spots.

Loyal Readers, It's that time of year again. Sparing you the cliches about how it seems like we just handed these things out a few weeks ago, it is indeed time to cap a rollercoaster year for US Soccer with our website's awards. First, a few notes about the hardware up for [...]

This world is riddled with boring cliches pertaining to the human spirit. Phrases such as don't give up and never back down. Ridiculous drivel seemingly custom-made for the cinemas.

The path of Sam Hutchinson is ready for the big screen as well only thing is it's a true story.

Warrior

Hutchinson, amazingly, signed a new one and a half year contract with Chelsea on Thursday.

On this week's podcast, we hail one of the great modern footballers - Juventus and Italy's Del Piero.

With identical 8-1 Conference records, the Joplin Eagles, Kickapoo Chiefs and Waynesville Tigers share the 2011 Ozark Conference title. Waynesville ensured a share with their win Wednesday evening at Glendale, a 2-1 overtime affair.

For the Eagles, it was their win at Rolla on Tuesday. From the Joplin Globe following the Eagles win Tuesday at Rolla

Dig up all those cliches — such as "biggest win in years" — for the Joplin High School soccer team.

Football League blog: Will Donny Rovers revolution signal the death of the club... or a rebirth?

For the new season, MirrorFootball is teaming up with some of the blogosphere's best new writers to bring you even more great football reads every single day. Friday is Football League day, so please be upstanding for theseventytwo.

Book review by guest editor Paul Demko.
Interviews with professional athletes are, as a general rule, terrible. Most players have become so jaded by the insatiable need of sports reporters for interesting (i.e. controversial) material that they inevitably revert to a tedious torrent of cliches.

| Subscribe: Weekly Football Phrase Each week the languagecaster team will explain a football phrase or cliche for learners of English who love the sport. Click on the link below to hear the word or phrase, while you can also read the transcript below that. You can also find many more examples by going to [.

Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it. | Subscribe: Weekly Football Phrase

Each week the languagecaster team will explain a football phrase or cliche for learners of English who love the sport. Click on the link below to hear the word or phrase, while you can also read the transcript below that.

Photo: Paul Rudderow

His name on a Union lineup card results in instant vitriol on this and other websites.

His face in the Philadelphia locker room produces a very different result. Following a spectacular three-goal turnaround that earned a 4-4 tie against the Revolution, Sebastien Le Toux said with a laugh, "My teammates joke around with me, especially Stefani Miglioranzi, that in the last ten games I'm going to score every game and help the team the best I can like I didn't do at the beginning of the season.

After lots of European action last week with the national teams, it's time for the clubs to get in on the action. On this week's podcast, the team at languagecaster.com previews the Champions League group stages as they kick off next week. Remember, you can also:

• Listen only to the main report here complete with transcript and vocabulary
• Learners of English can review the footballing news from around the world in our good, the bad and the ugly section of the show
• Check out a new football expression in English for Football
• For learners of English check out our Football Language Resources page with:
• A page with all our Football vocabulary posts
• Football glossary (a huge collection of football vocabulary, football cliches and football phrases)
• Worksheets and transcripts from previous podcasts

Automatically receive the podcast each week by clicking here

For whatever reason, Christian Poulsen has been a regular whipping-boy for Liverpool fans over the last year. He has constantly been labelled 'not good enough', and generally treated with disrespect. This is totally unfair because, as I will illustrate, Poulsen had a positive impact for Liverpool overall.

I'll be honest, I have only had the luxury of watching the second half of this match. What I saw was as bad as it's been for the Dynamo all season on the road. Disjointed play between the defense and forwards, the midfield nonexistent, repetitions of what we see in pretty much every away game. And just like every away game, the Dynamo failed to win.

It's started. Prematurely ecstatic over Diarra's arrival, a couple of days ago a messageboard poster was positively drooling over his midfield selection. ‘Diarra and Sandro as DMs, Modric and Hud further forward with Lennon and Bale on the wings. Can't wait to see that!' It took a while before a few people gently pointed out that add a back four and keeper, that makes eleven a team without strikers.

The fixtures are out and the pre-season friendlies have started. This is a time of year for unbridled optimism and Swansea City supporter David James can look forward to his team's first appearance in the top division of the game since 1983. They've had quite a journey to get back there, though.

The US bucked the norm, but not the cliche....

This column by TSG's Nick Sindt with support from: John Nyen, Jose Ceniceros, Nathan Gower, Luke Sandblom & Matthew Connors.

The piece was originally conceived due to our Soccer Cliches piece thanks to the contribution of Matt Mathai.

Photo by Testuggine+1

Whenever a club appoints a successful former player as manager, many in the media wonder why clubs the world over turn towards what appears to be nothing more than sentimentality in the selection process for perhaps its most important employee. And, quite honestly, I understand this criticism.

The Wilshere Ultimatum: What Jack Wilshere's exclusion from Under-21 duty says about English football is a post from: Just Football

"All men make mistakes, but only wise men learn from their mistakes."
- Winston Churchill

"What we really need is everyone working together for the benefit of the game in this country and the development of young players.

Back when Kenny Dalglish took over the managerial role of Liverpool during early January, many including myself had doubts about his footballing knowledge with 'The King' being out of touch with the game for over a decade. But then it hardly took me 30 minutes of football under him to be convinced to write my first post in over six months.

Time to beat the Blaugrana..

The football-ing world has been buzzing with excitement. A contest that will be relished by everybody is in store. We here at 11G are just as excited about the Champions League encounter as any of you fans out there. Yes! Barcelona is coming to the Emirates; again.

Recently I got a chance to read Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim's book, Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports are Played and Games are Won. For those that regularly read this blog you know I enjoy statistics and looking at the break down of them when it comes to the game. Moskowitz and Wertheim take an incredibly deep look into statistics and break down many of the stereotypes of sports that most fans think of.

On one hand, the endless trolley cars of cliches spilling from the mouths of footballers the world over can be and has become a little difficult to bear. We know you'd rather play for a bigger club and that you are "happy to see out your contract" is a touch of an emotional exaggeration. Happy? No.

The Beautiful South
Brighton 3-1 Portsmouth (08:01:11)

by Larry from Lancing

Ever since Charles Alcock (no jokes from us on that name, EFW is a family publication and remains strictly above the waist) suggested on 20 July 1871: ‘That it is desirable that a Challenge Cup should be established in connection with The Association, for which all clubs belonging to The Association should be invited to compete', the great and good of the footie world have been up for the cup.

One of the cliches you hear a lot is that great players don't make great coaches. The names "Diego Maradona" and "Ruud Gullit" probably come storming to mind, along with several others.
There's a lot of truth to the stereotype. Doing and teaching, as the joke goes, are very different things.