Day 2 of the World Cup saw three matches being played: one from Group A and the other two from Group B, including Wales against The USA and it is this game that we feature in today’s football language podcast. We explain the classic football cliche, ‘a game of two halves‘. You can 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 admin@languagecaster.com. Embed from Getty Imageswindow.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'_qG9euE2Qmt5z4ydfu_cxQ',sig:'Hphx1Y_EHKD5jM0K17fGwoOykmkxs8uIY4Nm0C5RWB8=',w:'594px',h:'411px',items:'1244973433',caption: false ,tld:'com',is360: false })});   Football Language Podcast – 2022 World Cup Language: Game of Two Halves (Wales 1-1 USA) DF: Hello again everyone and welcome to Languagecaster.com – the football-language podcast for learners and teachers of English. This is Damian and I along with Damon, who’s based in Japan, form the Languagecaster team. And over the next month or so, we will be explaining some of the words and phrases from the 2022 World Cup currently taking place in Qatar. On this short podcast, I’ll be looking at the classic football cliche, ‘a game of two halves‘ from the Wales versus USA match. Stinger: You are listening to languagecaster.com (from Brazil) Game of two halves The phrase, a game of two halves is one of the great football cliches; remember that a cliche is a saying that, although it my have lost some of its power or indeed its original meaning, is still happily used by a group of people who share common interests. They are a bit of fun. In football, there are lots and lots of football cliches – phrases that we love to use even though we know they may sound a little… strange or even cheesy. Perhaps one of the most famous of these cliches is ‘a game of two halves‘ which is not simply a description of how a typical match is divided into two 45-minute parts but this phrase has much more meaning behind it. A game of two halves could suggest that the first half of a game is quite dull, boring and defensive with few attacking plays, while the second half is the opposite – lots of attacks, end-to-end football and maybe goals and incidents. So, if one half is very different from the other half we can use this cliche. Perhaps the most common usage though, is when one team is much, much better than their opponents in the first half – they totally outplay them – but then after the break, their opponents play much better than them. And this is what happened in the Wales versus USA match on day two of the 2022 World Cup.