Sports idioms

Hi everyone!

How is it going?

In this entry I leave you with two videos about idioms related to sports (you can play them with or without subtitles). Remember that idioms are expressions whose meaning is different from the meaning of the individual words put together, e.g. "to smell a rat" doesn't mean that you're smelling a rat (!!!), but rather that you're suspicious about something.

In the first video you have idioms related to athletics ("a false start"; "to jump the gun"; "the front runner");

in the second video the idioms are related to balls ("keep your eye on the ball"; "it's a whole new ball game"; on the ball").

Idioms might be difficult to learn in the sense that they have to be learnt by heart (you cannot guess the meaning). However, if you manage to use them in everyday conversation, you'll sound a lot more natural in English!! The best thing to learn them is to use them in sentences and remember the examples. Here you have one by a student from Nigeria:

Seyi, Nigeria

The girl of my dreams is a front runner in terms of beauty; when I asked her out I thought I jumped the gun... I just hope we don't have a false start!

Do you think you could build a similar sentence? Go ahead and post it as a comment!