This football language podcast focuses on one word – bounce. This is used in a variety of phrases in the language of football. The transcript for this podcast is available below, and you can also access 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 please contact us at admin@languagecaster.com or leave a question or comment on our forum. (DB=Damon) Bounce – Football Language Podcast: Season 2021-22 DB: Hello everyone. My name’s Damon, one half of the langaugecaster team. Damian, of course, is the other member of the languagecaster team. I hope he is doing well over in London. As for Tokyo, where I am based – it’s cold and a little bit rainy; winter is coming. Thanks for listening to our football language podcast and remember our site is a great place to come if you want to improve your English while also talking about the beautiful game of football. OK, today, I’ll be talking about one word – bounce – and how it is used in different phrases in football. Before I do that, if you like what we do here at languagecaster, please show us by leaving comments, sharing our podcasts and posts, and maybe also by leaving a donation to help keep us up and running. We really appreciate everyone who supports us, as it helps keep our website running! ** Click below to donate to languagecaster.com and keep the football language coming! ** Stinger: You are listening to languagecaster.com (in Swahili). Bounce DB: Yes, you are listening to languagecaster.com and that message was in Swahili! OK, bounce, what does it mean? Well, to bounce is the action a ball makes when it is dropped; it bounces back up. So in a sport with a ball, you can imagine there will be a lot of use for this verb. It is also used as a noun – a bounce: for example, a big bounce means the ball bounced a long way up off the pitch. Let’s take a look at some of these uses. Bounce off This phrase is used a lot to describe when the ball hits a player rather than the player kicking or heading the ball. It is often accidental. The ball can bounce off someone, or bounce off the goal post. You may often hear it with ‘shin’ the part of the leg above the foot and below the knee. Nobody plans to kick the ball with the shin, so if it bounces off the shin, it means it was an accident. It could be lucky or result in a miss. Let’s look at some examples. Here is one from 2020 from the BBC: And Norwich’s nightmare continued when Wood eventually gave Burnley the lead- Johann Gudmundsson slipped as he curled it in from the right and it bounced off Wood’s shin as his overhead effort rolled into the bottom corner. So this was a lucky bounce. the ball hit the player’s shin and he scored. Bounce Back Now, our next phrase, bounce back, is not used to talk about the ball but about a team or a player. If a team bounces back from a defeat, it means they perform well after losing their previous match. They are bouncing ‘up’ again – in form or even moving up the table. A player can also bounce back after a poor run of form – several games where they have not played well. If they bounce back, they play really well. Here is an example from the Daily Mirror online from January, 2021: