I am not a sports fan and I readily admit, reader, that what I know about the "beautiful game" can be summed up in the following five sentences:
1. Football is not rugby.
2. It has something to do with goals.
3. In the 1960s a Bristol Rovers player called Bobby Jones used to cross himself before he took a corner - or whatever the verb is for what footballers do with corners - and then wiggle his bum rather seductively.
4. Another Bobby, Bobby Moore, seemed the cutest thing in the neatest of shorts to me in 1966.
5. The Italian national team has the hunkiest players in the world.
Thus it was that a young student of mine who wishes to speak about A.C. Milan as an exam topic had to spend half an hour physically demonstrating to me what an "assist" is this afternoon. "Do you know what a pass is, at least?" he asked in exasperation towards the end of this time. I replied that even I could probably work that out, then turned to the internet where I learned, to my consternation, that "assist" is an English noun for whatever a footballer does when "assisting" the player who is about to score the goal.
Meanwhile my student, having given up on me, had written,
"Ibrahimovic is the best player and he does many assists and I have his teacher."
"You have his teacher?!" I exclaimed, wondering if we had a footballing prodigy in our midst. But frantic scribbling out ensued and my student substituted the word, "t-shirt".
There endeth the lesson.
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| Image of Zlatan Ibrahimovic - Wikipedia |
9 comments:
You're having too much fun!
He he! Tell your student in my behalf that Ibrahimovic didn't make many assists when he played in FC Barcelona, and no one here misses him or has his "teacher" :D
Sultan Ibramovich sounds like the OWNER of Chelsea football team, not a player in (but not from, I take it) Italy...!
An assist? How funny, that's kind of like other strange Italian uses of English like "footing" or a "spot".
Great fun ... but I must have read too many thrillers, because I was thinking kidnap.... :)
Sometimes, Rosaria! Hi, Josep. I will tell him that with pleasure. Yes, the name does sound like that, Gleds! I gather he is Swedish. Hi, Sarettta. Sounded odd to me, too. Hi, Rachel. Yes, too many thrillers!
Do you know the offside rule?
All I know about that is that it causes a lot of shouting, Ellee!
Yes he's swedish. He has "saved" us many times when explaining us being from Sweden...
- Swiss? Swizerland?...
- No,no, noo... Ibrahimovic-land!
- Aaa Svezia!
- Si, si!!!
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