Welcome back after Golden Week. I hope you had a nice time. I spent the week with my in-laws in Nagano, and had a lovely time relaxing and seeing friends. I also saw the movie, Captain America,Civil War. It was great and had amazing action scenes. I recommend you see it! You can study English while enjoying the movie!
Do you like football? Football can be a confusing word because to UK speakers it means soccer (like what the J-League and Shimizu S-Pulse play) and to speakers from the USA it means American football (the one where you wear helmets and body armour and throw an oval ball). To be clear, the football I’m talking about today is the first one, soccer.
This weekend is the last round of matches in the English Premier League. I’m a soccer fan and so are many of our students. There are many Premier League fans here supporting Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United. It’s been a really remarkable season this time.
I support Aston Villa. I used to go their matches a lot when I was in the UK. This year has been terrible for Aston Villa. We finished 20th out of 20 teams and have been relegated. Not only that, we have only 17 points. The team in 19th position has 34 points, double the amount. We were, by a long distance the worst in the league. Next year, I hope we can regroup and recover a little but it won’t be easy.
The story at the top of the table is even more shocking. Last years champions, Chelsea, are only 10th and the winners this time are Leicester City, who won the Premier League for the first time. Leicester City were bottom of the league, like Aston Villa, just over a year ago. They had great form at the end of last season and managed to avoid relegation. Despite changing managers, they continued this great form and have been the best team in the league by far, winning the Premier League by 10 points. This is extra amazing because Leicester have spent little money to do this. Their squad and wage bill cost about a quarter of the big clubs like Manchester United, Manchester City and Chelsea. They even spent a lot less money than Aston Villa! That’s why their betting odds to win the league were 5000-1 at the start of the season. Congratulations to Leicester! Congratulations to their Japanese forward, Shinji Okazaki. He’s the second Japanese player to win the league after Shiji Kagawa.
Do you support a football team? How was their season? Thanks for reading,
Kevin
当校の特徴


