Hello. This is 6 Minute English from BBC
Learning English. I'm Neil.
And I'm Georgie.
Whether it's Cinderella,
David and Goliath or the Rocky movies,
we all love an underdog story.
The underdog in a situation is the person who seems least likely to win,
nevertheless, with some luck
and plenty of hard work the underdog sometimes ends up the winner.
Sport is full of underdog stories -
minor teams and sports people who play with courage
and end up beating the superstars and multi-million pound clubs.
But if you were given a choice between your team being the favourite
to win or being the underdog,
it's pretty obvious you'd want to be the favourite, right?
Well yes,
being the favourite gives the team confidence, but maybe the fact that
no-one expects the underdog to win is actually an advantage
which could help them to a surprise victory. In this programme,
we'll be hearing about an underdog
football club, doing just that
and as usual, we'll be learning some useful new vocabulary, too.
Great. But first I have a question for you, Georgie.
One of the biggest underdog stories in sports history
happened in the 2015-16 English football season
when a little known club beat top clubs like Manchester City and Liverpool
overcoming odds of 5000-1 to win the Premier League,
but which club was it? a) Charlton Athletic
b) Leicester City or c) Crystal Palace?
I'll guess it was Crystal Palace.
OK Georgie,
I'll reveal the correct answer at the end of the programme.
The English football Premier League is a good place to find underdogs.
Each season the three best clubs in their second league are promoted up
while the three weakest Premier League clubs are relegated down.
One club that knows all about relegation is Luton Town FC.
In 2009,
Luton Town were relegated entirely from the English league.
Slowly, their fortunes improved
however, and they have now become the first English team to progress from non-league
to the Premier League.
Here's Luton fan, Alex, talking about his team's chances to BBC radio programme,
Mental Muscle:
But some of these Elite Premier League clubs will look down their nose at us
and just think we shouldn't be there, and we are there on merit
and we've just gotta prove it this season.
So we are the underdog, certainly, financially, but on the pitch
I don't think we will be.
Alex thinks
some of the rich Premier League clubs will look down their noses at Luton.
If you look down your nose at someone, you think you're better than them.
But underdogs Luton have done better than expected,
even beating some of the big clubs like Newcastle United.
The question is how?
Is there something about being the underdog
that improves a team's chances of winning?
To answer that sports psychologist,
Gillian Cook, spoke to BBC
Radio programme Mental Muscle.
So, you could find that when
the newly-promoted team comes up,
they've got high confidence because they've just come
from a season of winning -
so they've got the belief that they can do it.
But on the flip side,
it's just as important to look at the top dogs' performance
who everyone expects them to win they're playing the newly-promoted team.
So we might think of Man City
who might be about to come up against Luton Town.
So, what we can see from that is what in psychology literature
is known as choking and that's
when pressure gets to an individual or a team and they underperform.
Clubs newly promoted to the Premier League are used to winning
and start the season confidently. On the flip side,
they have to play much stronger teams than before. The phrase 'on the flip side'
is used to show the opposite, less positive side of something.
Of course it's not just the underdog playing, there are also top dogs,
the most successful or powerful person or team.
No-one expects underdogs to win
and this gives them freedom to relax and play naturally.
Top dogs, on the other hand, experience a lot of expectation,
and this sometimes leads to 'choking',
a sports term which describes the failure of a player to perform
their best because of psychological pressure or social expectation.
Choking causes teams and players to underperform,
to perform worse than expected. It is also true that neutral fans -
people watching a match when their team isn't playing
- tend to support the underdog as well.
In football, it's tough at the top.
I think it's time to reveal the answer to your question, Neil.
You asked me about the famous Premiere League winning underdogs
of the 2015-16 football season
and I guessed it was Crystal Palace.
Which was the wrong answer,
I'm afraid, Georgie. In fact, it was Leicester City, nicknamed
the foxes, who became the unexpected champions of the Premier League.
OK, let's recap the vocabulary
we've learned from this programme about the underdog,
the person in a competition or situation who seems least likely to win.
If you look down your nose at someone, you think you are superior to them.
The phrase 'on the flip side', is used to show the opposite, less positive
or less popular side of something. 'The top dog' is an informal way
of saying the most successful or powerful person in a group.
In sports, choking happens when a player or team fail to perform their best
because of psychological pressure or social expectation.
And finally, the verb 'to underperform' means to perform worse than expected.
Once again, our six minutes are up.
Remember to join us again next time
for more topical discussion and useful vocabulary, here at 6 Minute
English. Goodbye for now! Bye!