Conor Coady's football club, alphabetical top flights & the world's most generic team name

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He's round the goal, Keeper.

He's done it.

Absolutely incredible.

He launched himself six feet into the crowd and Kung Fu kicked a supporter who was eye whip without a shadow of a doubt getting him lit.

Oh, I say!

It's amazing!

He does it, tame, and tame, and tame again.

Break up the music!

Charge a glass!

This nation is going to dance all night!

Wrexham, welcome to Connor Cody.

Half-assed gambling advert spiel, Jeremy Corbyn on allotments.

Stephen Warnock makes a pig's ear of a cliché.

How do we feel about double-header friendlies?

An Albanian club name made up entirely of prefixes and suffixes, the alphabetical distribution of the pre-embryonic league tables of the European Big Five, astonishing scenes in the edit history of Jimmy Greaves' Wikipedia page, and second string clothes getting a run out before being left off the plane.

Brought to your ears by Goal Hanger Podcasts.

This is Football Clichés.

Hello everyone and welcome to Football Clichés.

I'm Adam Hurry.

This is the midweek adjudication panel.

Joining me is David Walker.

How are you doing?

I'm good.

And Nick Miller, how are you?

Very well.

Excellent.

I've got a bit of an update off the back of last week's listeners MHD episode.

The climax of which, if you haven't listened, was a very enjoyable chat about why there seems to be...

an apparent dearth of chips in football stadiums.

I speculated that it was because nobody would trust the oily-faced teenagers who staff the kiosks of the football stadiums with a deep fat fryer.

And it turns out I'm not a million miles away, but I should perhaps have had a bit more faith in

the youngsters.

So listener, Christian, he got in touch with me and he said that it's actually a ventilation issue.

Not many football grounds, if any.

There are a couple.

I think Watford had a spell having a bit of having some chips on sale at one stage.

But basically, most football grounds don't have the required ventilation that you need.

What a boring answer, but makes makes perfect sense.

I mean,

Nick, I guess this does make sense because, you know, most food at modern stadiums is served in a concourse, which is pretty much adjacent to the bowels of a stadium.

And it's famously unwell-ventilated places.

Classic, yeah, classically, sort of directly underneath the seating as well.

So you don't want to be ventilating, you know, oil or whatever right into the seats, do you?

It'd be quite quite a nice football-y smell to waft up, though, wouldn't it?

Chips.

And you'd make people hungry, and they want to go back down and buy them.

Exactly.

Yeah.

It's like Sainsbury's pumping in the bread smell.

Yeah, the next new stadium is going to boast chippy ventilation.

Now, Nick, among the best correspondence I received before this episode was a tweet from former Nottingham Forest Forward turned rock star Paul McGregor, who objected to being described on last week's clichés quiz as a waif.

Yes, I saw this.

I'm standing with you on this one.

I think he was quite wafy.

He was very wafy.

He's very, very sort of slim, not massively tall guy.

So yeah, I think you're fine.

Yeah.

I'm just having a look at him now to see whether I agree with him or you.

Is he wify?

He's sort of got quite wafy hair.

You know, it was sort of wispy.

Yeah, wispy hair.

Wispy and wafy.

Wispy and wify.

I guess a little bit wafy.

Yeah.

Yeah, this.

This won't be the first act of pedantry on this episode.

A reminder, of course, that you can join us on tour in 2025.

Go to tickets.footballcliches.com to get your ticket and join us in Brighton, Cardiff, London, Birmingham, Dublin, Manchester, not Leeds or Glasgow because they're sold out, but it's going to be brilliant.

A footballer's names in things popped up yesterday that I'm saving for the live show because it's so good.

And if that's not a reason to turn up, I don't know what is.

So come and join us.

I am looking forward to it.

As you said the other day, only two months ago now, which, you know, starting to

get there.

We need to start putting this show together soon, don't we?

But a London show is on a Sunday.

We've never done a Sunday show show before.

It's on Sunday, the 12th of October.

And this led me initially to think whether any listeners who would be so minded to get involved in a potential clichés extravaganza of watching Ribblesdale play on Sunday morning, watching Super Sunday in the pub in the afternoon, then doing the cliché show in the evening.

Oh, I fear for you.

That's the hell of a stent that, in it.

Slight spanner in the works.

It's in the international break, so they won't.

I'm not sure what's going to be on some Scottish football, maybe, but no, even that's not going to be on, is it?

What's maybe England will be playing on the Sunday or something, but it's not quite as

might have to watch the F1.

Oh, God.

That sounds like one of the worst days of my life already.

I'm not even watching the F1 in a pub.

I just don't, I don't know how that would work.

Listen, I've seen it.

It's starting to be a thing.

Really?

It is starting to be a thing.

You're seeing people, and it's always the McLaren fans in their orange t-shirts.

Fuck me.

Is it on the little chalkboards outside?

Rubbish.

That's putting people off.

Don't put people off.

Come to the live shows, tickets.football cliches.com.

Right, time for the midweek adjudication panel.

Quite simply, Nick, Conor Cody, welcome to Wrexham.

I think the people who I spoke to about the club, I think the people within the club, I think really attracted me to the football club.

I love playing with good people, I love being around good people, and that's what's certainly here at this football club.

I'm not here to just be part of Wrexham.

I'm here to really drive the club and hopefully take the club to the place where it wants to be.

And that's what I've come here for.

And I want to play there again.

It's as simple as that.

I want to be part of that again, and I want to be part of it with this football club.

That's another thing that I'm really thankful for for the football club.

I've spent a lot of years away from home, and it's the first time of the football club, but a lot of players have played in this division before, they know about it.

And for me, I'll give you everything.

I'll give you everything every single day of my life of being at Wrexham, being part of this football club, being excited to be part of this football club.

It's got everything you could possibly hope for from a Connor Cody interview, Nick.

Jack Copper of listenfairplay.com fame has done his analysis on this interview.

Five minutes and 28 seconds this interview is, and Connor Cody reels off seven football clubs, which is 1.28 football clubs per minute, astonishingly.

There are an additional 16 instances of a club, the club, or this club, which I actually did not include in my montage/slash analysis.

I let those slide, but they are very much part of the kind of wider earnest tapestry of being Conor Cody.

So let's get to the crux of this.

This is one football club from Connor Cody every 46.8 seconds, which just beats his record set on his Everton unveiling of one football club every 47.8 seconds.

So

he's getting better.

He's showing no signs of slowing down.

It's probably his last move as well, isn't it?

Probably his last opportunity to really do this.

So it's nice that he has beat his own record.

Yeah.

But I mean, Dave, this is perfect.

The perfect combination of player and club to beat his record, I think.

Yes.

I mean, just the whole thing is just.

There's almost, if you actually watch this video, there's a sort of smirk on his face.

Like, it's almost as if he sort of knows what he's doing.

Surely this must have been mentioned to him at some point.

I mean,

it's mad, really.

He's just a lovely bloke.

He gets away with it.

I'm all right with him.

I think Connor Cody's just a tremendous man.

I really like him.

Yeah, no, I think you're right.

I think it does feel genuine for sure.

But

at one point where he goes, I'll give you everything every day of my life.

The whole interview is like that, Nick.

There's proverbial brick walls everywhere.

It's wedding vows.

Yeah.

It's in sickness and in health.

Richer, poorer.

Don't mind.

Do you think that you say it's his last move, but do you think this kind of this persona that he's obviously

designed to actually extend his career beyond any kind of like normal football career would?

You know, he can sign for a club.

He doesn't actually have to play any football.

He can just be the guy that is good to hang around.

Yeah, and also like coaching, managerial career,

he can do it.

Yeah, for as long as he's in the game, this can keep happening.

He actually spends a large portion of this interview essentially framing himself as someone who's great around the dressing room.

Like he says, I'm going to come in, set the standards every day and that sort of stuff.

So he barely talks about playing at all.

Although he is raring to get started.

Of course he is.

I think setting standards is fine to say of yourself, but I thought you were going to say he's going to, I'm going to, you know, I'll be laughing there.

I'll tell some jokes.

You know, banter.

Oh, bless him.

Yeah, great man, and great to see he's keeping his numbers up.

Right, this came from Jesus Freak.

Here is Rangers' new boy Oliver Antman talking after their 3-0 win over Victoria Poulzen in the first leg of their Champions League qualifying tie.

Oliver, how was that for the Rangers' debut?

Yeah, it was great.

Great atmosphere, great stadium.

Yeah, we played some good football and

yeah, took the three points.

No, not three points.

We won.

That's the most important thing.

Dave, great to see someone finally correcting themselves.

It's a classic pitfall.

It happens all the time.

This is the byproduct of autopilot post-match footballer interviews.

Finally, someone has had the self-awareness to take a step back and say, do you know what?

No.

No, it's not right.

Yeah, yeah.

That's nice.

Nice bit of awareness.

And also like that he still got in, that's the, we won, that's the most important thing.

Even when he was laughing, he still got in, obviously,

the win is the most important thing.

I mean, just getting the points, getting the three points, Nick, is just so core to the full point of view experience.

If you can't have that, you're lost.

A couple of rounds from him being accurate as they sort of seemed to serve as a lovely little sort of tension breaker as well.

He was quite, he seemed quite stiff.

Maybe he hasn't really done many of these kind of post-master interviews before.

But then when he realised, oh, what a gaff, then he had a nice little laugh and everyone was relaxed afterwards.

Yeah, teammate next to joining in.

It was just fantastic.

Yeah, um, feel good factor everywhere.

Speaking of autopilot half-assed football chat, here is an excerpt from a Skybet podcast advert.

Uh, this is basically it in its entirety, actually.

XG,

park the bus, put it on a plate, put it in the mixer.

How's your touch?

Wand of a left foot

on the beach.

Vergi tan.

Top bins.

Lins.

Hang it in the live.

It's not for everyone, it's for the fans.

What?

That's it.

I just reeled off some phrases.

Some of them are on vogue, some aren't.

What's the point?

It reminds me a little bit of.

I remember going to see Morrissey many years ago before he'd, you know, before he'd said most of the really bad stuff.

And before he came out, there was like some sort of foreboding music over the top of which someone was just reading aloud bad things, bad words, like cancer, Margaret Thatcher, all this kind of thing.

And it was one of the weirdest things I've ever heard.

And that's kind of a sort of a lighter version of that.

I mean, we have a vested interest here, Dave, you know, in football phraseology, but you can't just chuck these things in and say, well, that's it, that's footy, can you?

Rubbish.

Yeah, not quite sure what the point was.

It's for the fans.

Just for the fans.

But a nice selection, though, I would say.

Yeah.

Pretty broad.

Pretty broad selection.

Yeah, a few quibbles, but we'll move on.

Next up, Dave, this is Jeremy Corbyn on allotments.

He says, of course, social housing is desperately needed, but we we need not sacrifice these vital green spaces to build it.

We can build on ex-industrial land and take over empty properties.

Even then, we should ensure social housing is accompanied by community gardens and adequate growing space.

Is this government going to put the nail in the coffin of the joy of digging around for potatoes on a cold, wet February Sunday afternoon?

The Stoke chat has reached allotments.

This is great.

February's good for this, I think.

Yeah, Sunday afternoon as well.

Yeah, classic allotment territory, surely.

I think so.

I had a look, actually.

There are 80 different allotment allotment sites in Stoke-on-Trent.

So plenty of potential for this to go the whole hog.

Roy Delap chucking his turnips as far as he can.

Right.

This came from Danny Wilson.

Here is Stephen Warnock on 5 Live talking about Chelsea's youthful squad.

Now, Chelsea, a lot of fans might argue and say, well, we've just won the Club World Cup.

Great.

But over the course of the season, you had ups and downs, pigs and troughs throughout the season.

Nick, for my own sanity, please confirm he says pigs and troughs.

Yep, pretty sure he said pigs and troughs there.

Lovely.

I mean,

sort of works.

Dave, what percentage of the five live listenership at that moment have gone away from that show thinking, maybe it is pigs and troughs

all this time.

Does it work?

Maybe it does work.

I love it.

Pigs.

And their troughs.

The pig is the pig is eating from the trough.

Yeah.

You know,

the trough is below.

And

it could work, could work.

I'm sorry to Stephen Warrot, but I mean, it feels like ridiculous.

I'm not.

I want to slightly entertain the idea that the phrase could be pigs and troughs, and we've been saying it wrong all this time.

Brilliant.

Right, more straightforward now.

This came from Billy Clark, Dave.

Here is the sound of Grimsby's Cameron McJanet doubling their lead against Crawley in League Two on Saturday.

That should be the new Ellis James crowd noise.

But

more pertinently, Dave, what a thumping header sound that is, by the way.

Yeah, proper thumper.

Lovely sound.

Really nice.

When you're at a football match or you're close enough to a pitch where you can hear and you almost feel the sound of professional quality balls, they do always sound harder.

All right, Troy Dini.

Yeah, yeah.

Don't you think they sound really hard?

Like, that sounds like you're just going to, you know, sticking your head on that.

I hate a properly pumped up ball, Nick.

I want a bit of give to my, you know, polyurethane.

Yeah, and you.

But also, when you're playing five or six, unless someone's very fancy and they're playing with a professional quality ball, there's always, there's that sort of, it's not the sound of like a flyaway ball with that ping on it.

Yeah.

But there's always an element of that.

And I don't know whether that's just the lack of skill involved in the person kicking the ball or the ball itself.

But yeah,

you never hear that sound that satisfying in anything other than professional football.

It's such a sweet spot, though, isn't it?

Because even just a little bit under-inflated

from where you want it to be is terrible.

Yeah.

And it just ruins the feel of it.

I just don't like it.

But if you just go a little bit over, again, I think it ruins it on the other end.

One of our

assistant manager at Ribblesdale, he's a bit of a gadgetman.

He's always bringing along all sorts of contraptions.

He's got like a massage gun.

He brought a drone along to the game a few times.

And he bought one of these pumps for the balls that are sort of like proper sort of professional pump that you just blow the air in.

You don't have to do the old sort of hand pumping thing.

And it's got like a little reader of the is it PSI?

Yeah.

So you get it like bang on.

And he did that with all our balls and they're just too hard.

Yeah.

That just not fun.

It's harder to control, it's not as satisfying.

You want it to embrace your foot to an extent, not to sort of angrily confront it.

But particularly for either side, there is always one person who, if there is that little bit of give in it, there is one person, usually the one who takes it all too seriously.

He says, Ball's flat, lads, balls flat.

You gotta go and pump this up.

But playing with a flat ball, I mean, it's just awful as well.

But yeah, there we are.

But yeah,

if they ban heading, then this sound is going to go as well.

That'll be a real shame.

Little Footballers names in things for you.

This came from Colin, the great Colin.

It's from a YouTube live stream of planes landing at Leeds Bradford Airport during storm florists.

So I think the pilot of this is called Mike Newell.

Doing good so far.

There you go.

Similarly, retrograde views on female pilots, presumably.

Yeah, it's a shame for Mike Newell that his sexist opinions overtook the fact that he was the guy who scored a hat-trick in the Champions League and all that.

You'd want that to be your headline, wouldn't you?

But no.

I don't think we can rule out that it's him.

He could just be an amateur pilot in his retirement.

He looks quite commercial airline pilot, Mike Newell.

Yeah.

He did in his pomp.

Can see what you mean, actually.

Yeah.

Slick looking.

Yeah.

Could be.

Right.

Next up, Liverpool played athletic Bill Bow in a double header at Anfield on Monday night, Nick.

And favourite four writes in and says, during the second game of this double header, the commentator said, in the last meeting between the two sides, in reference to the first game that had finished about an hour before, surely that's not applicable here.

You can't have that.

No, no.

First goal that Liverpool scored against Bill Bowell since four o'clock this afternoon.

Dave, we rail against sort of tenuous stats about things that happened in 1948.

We can't have it both ways, can we?

No, no, of course not.

The last meeting.

It's the same meeting.

Yeah.

Isn't it?

It's not even though it's a doubleheader.

Even though it's a doubleheader, it's the same meeting.

Yeah, I mean, actually, yeah.

Nick, how do we feel about these double-header friendlies tearing at the tapestry of the structure of football?

I've heard of...

There have been friendlies where they've played three halves of 45 minutes.

What?

Yeah, just to give more players some game time.

So they play three lots of 45 minutes and call it one game.

The double header's very kind of...

I mean, well, the three halves thing is mental.

The doubleheader thing is quite sort of family fun day, isn't it?

I imagine

there was inflatable stuff in the car park.

And you need that stuff for a double header, Dave.

I mean, no matter how invested you are in your club's fortunes, and you've turned up and you've paid your money to be there.

I'm also thinking about the Emirates Cup here when there's two games in one day.

It's hard to sit through two games of football.

It's hard to watch one game sort of get started, reach its climax, and then sort of peter out, and then watch another game go through those same patterns as well.

It's difficult.

It's like watching four games in a World Cup day.

It's like, well, I've done this.

Yeah, and I think you need there to be a junior and senior partner of this thing.

Ideally, the first game would be a bit of a warm-up.

Starter and main.

Yeah, exactly.

Two standard 60-minute games is a bit weird.

This is not entirely unfamiliar to me anyway, because it's been quite one of the successes of the hundred in cricket is that they've done these double headers where

they have the women's team will play first and then the men's team will play second.

And in many instances, most of them, I think, in fact, that the women's game is always kind of much more entertaining.

can you imagine if they did that with England football imagine like the lionesses played a full game and then the men senior team came on afterwards it'd be I mean it'd be great but it'd just be too much almost too much going on yeah that's that's too much I mean I couldn't I couldn't sit and watch four hours of sort of live football would be being sort of assembled and dismantled twice but I could handle maybe like an under-18s game and then the men's senior team.

So you need that, as you said, Dave, that sort of dynamic of starter at Maine, basically.

Yeah.

That's yeah, that's too big a combination.

But someone in a commercial team somewhere is thinking about it.

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On that note, here is Celta Vigo's Iago Aspas just sat down at training listing the 2015-16 Leicester City squad.

I would pay good money to hear Iago Aspas just on stage just saying Demurai Gray's name in that way.

It felt like there was a, he'd, I don't know whether, presumably not deliberate, but it felt like he'd left a couple of pauses for someone to say whatever the Spanish firm, what a player he was, by the way.

Yeah, there was a bit of that going on for sure.

I mean, you know, you say you'd pay good money.

Like, what?

International break?

Sunday, October the 12th.

He's not going to have much on.

Come along, Iago.

Let's get you on stage.

I love the way that

he lingered on Albright and then he'd looked up Nick You're right.

He did look up to his teammates.

Was it Marcus Alonso?

Yeah, yeah.

I didn't know he was at Celta Vigo.

Yeah, and that was like a real sort of game-nose game.

Like

all Brighton, though, yeah.

Yeah, the spirit of this podcast really does appeal to people just sitting down and listing players' names.

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Oh, look at that!

That is wonderful!

Welcome back to Football Cliches.

This is the Midweek Adjudication Panel.

A reminder, if you go to dreamland.football clichés.com, you can sign up for our exclusive membership.

For $5.99 a month, you get two episodes a month of Dreamland, our exclusive news show.

Episode 5 in the works for the start of the news season.

You also get pre-sale access to Football Cliche's live events and free entry to cliché's quiz live events as well.

Right, next up, news that Darwin Nunez is close to an agreement with Al Hillal.

Nick, Fabrizio Romano says it's 350% done between the clubs.

Again, a very precise exaggeration.

Why?

What a figure to pick out Lino?

Yeah.

This is like Trump saying he's reduced drug prices in the US by 1500%, Dave.

Yeah.

You know, we've cut drug prices by 1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 1,500%.

I mean, yeah, as we now come to expect from Romano, completely and utterly ludicrous.

It's just getting out of control.

Wasn't there one the other day where he was reporting on an email being replied to?

Lovely little detail.

Lovely little details in in there from Romano.

Yeah,

he's flat out.

Is he just being CC'd into the emails now?

Is that it?

Just, why not?

Just get him in there.

Just copy him into all correspondence.

He's going to find out anyway.

25 million followers on Twitter, Nick.

What would you do with that?

I just think it can't be him all the time.

There must be like...

So I know of a.

There's a comedian called the Boy with Boy Tape on his face.

He's quite big in America now.

And now he has got like another.

He's sort of franchised himself.

So there's another fellow who does broadly the same act who he kind of sends out to do other gigs.

And I kind of feel like that that's yeah, it kind of feels like Romano must be like that as well.

He's got another one.

He's got some other ones that do this kind of.

I mean, I'm sure he has a social media team and all that kind of thing, but it just feels like he can't be doing all of this at the same time.

So he must have

sort of other versions of himself.

I mean, I stop short of calling the whole thing depressing.

I don't want to get too cynical about the whole thing.

But the idea of a Fabrizio Romano franchise out there just like a...

Oh, geez.

Anyway, right.

This was quite interesting from Alternative Car6159 on Reddit.

He's noticed an Albanian team called FC Dinamo City.

He says, are there any other team names made up of purely prefixes or suffixes of other teams?

Incredible hat-trick, Nick.

No one can find another hat-trick of prefix suffixes in a team name after FC Dynamo City.

Reyes of Davis says, Forest Green Rovers.

I'm not having green.

I'm not having green.

Sorry.

Even Forest is pretty tenuous.

It's only one club.

It's also quite disconcerting where you have, there are no, there are no real clues about where that club is from as well.

Forest Green Rovers is obviously a kind of similar thing, but yeah.

You would probably guess at Eastern Europe somewhere, but

if you were just faced with the name, you would have absolutely no concept of where they were from.

There's Swimming Pay 8509, says Dave.

There's a club in the Philippines called United City FC, which is about as generic as you could get.

Yeah, proper computer game stuff.

Yeah.

That, isn't it?

United City computer game badge as well, just a football with some stars on it.

I mean, I'd love to know more about it, though, actually.

What how has this club come about, United City FC?

Is it a new thing?

Is it an amateur thing?

And I say even the same for FC Dynamo City.

Because Dynamo

are they usually the police teams?

CSK is the army.

Locomotive is the trains, obviously.

Startac is the workers.

Dinamo's the army?

No, hang on.

Dinamo is.

I think it's police.

Is it?

I think Dinamo Moscow is the police.

Yeah.

We're all googling it at the very same time.

Jonathan Wilson's going to unleash this to us on a quiz one day.

We should know this.

We'll remember this day.

Interior Ministry.

Yeah, it's basically police.

So they are essentially the Albanian version of the Metropolitan Police.

Have they gone out at the first round of the extra preliminary preliminary stage of the Albanian FA Cup?

Really hope they've got an extra preliminary round of the Albanian Cup.

Lovely.

Okay, if you thought we weren't mid-week adjudication panelly enough, here's this from Andrew Richardson.

He says, this may be too boring to make it on.

No, but I was looking at the 2025-26 League Earth table in its current state of alphabetical order.

And LeHav are in fourth place.

It just seems crazy to me that there are only three teams, Anger, Auxerre, and Brest, in the entire top flight whose names start with any of the first 11 letters of the alphabet.

Nick, this is insane.

Insane, I tell you.

You feel like something should be done about this as well.

There are lots of L's in Lee on there.

So there's your problem.

But they're not relying on le, you know.

They're not relying on that.

There's Lans, there's Lille, there's L'Orian, Lyon, very L-heavy.

As you cans, get them up there.

Big time.

Anyone know any French cities begin with D?

Dijon?

Dijon, yeah.

Dunkirk.

Very mid-table heavy in the alphabet.

Loads of L's, loads of M's and N's.

That takes up the

entire swathe of their division.

But anyway, Andrew Richardson says, Nick, in Premier League terms, I always think of Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool to start at the top of the bottom half of the alphabet, which is where they are for next season.

But so, yeah, so I took the trouble of looking at the top five European leagues to see how they're alphabetically distributed.

So the Premier League.

An early check on the standings.

Pre-embryonic league.

Pre-embryonic, exactly.

That's what I was after.

The Premier League is fairly well distributed, Nick.

You've got your A's, your B's, your C's.

Then, as is always the case, there's a big jump to Everton.

Fulham always plugged this gap a little bit, and then you're in the L's straight away.

To me, the L's are the start of the second half of the alphabet, proper.

And that's where leads kick in in 11th place.

That's when the alphabet gets started in earnest, really, doesn't it?

They come thick and fast after that.

It's the business end of the.

WXYZ is the business end of the alphabet, really, isn't it?

I would say so.

But yeah, so the Premier League holding holding up quite well, Nick, I would say.

You get bogged down in the L's and M's a little bit.

Manchester City and Manchester United are always going to, always going to stop you in your tracks a little bit.

But yeah, relatively well distributed, wouldn't you agree?

I mean, you've done the research, so I can't quibble with that.

No, well, let's move over to Serie R now, then, Dave, because they've got A's, B's, C's, then F, G, H, I, J, L,

N, P,

R, S, T, U.

Not bad.

A lesser spotted U.

Yeah.

And Aze, nice.

That's true.

No Ds, no D's in Italy.

Italian cities.

Beginning with D.

It's not happening, is it?

Dead air.

Right.

Over to La Liga.

Where's Horncastle?

A, B, C, E, G, L, M, O.

Loads of R's.

And they're all prefixed.

So there's...

We'll get onto this in a moment.

But that that feels like cheating.

A couple of Vs.

So.

Yeah, Betty's, get them up there.

Yeah, exactly.

So, yeah.

Speaking of which, over to the Bundesliga, which is an absolute mess, by the way.

Augsburger top, fine.

Then Union Berlin.

Like, what?

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Exactly.

Hang on a minute.

How's that happened?

They treat their prefixes sort of quite lightly.

So Berlin is...

Berlin a second, Bremen a third, despite being Verde Bremen.

Then it's Barussia Dortmund.

Whoa, no, no, no, no, no.

What are they playing at here?

This is dreadful.

To be fair, Brussia Dortmund are there legitimately because they're D.

So I've mixed that up.

Yeah.

And then you're down with the one dot lot.

One FC Heidenheim, one FC Kohln.

I don't know what letter they're using.

Well, they're using H and K.

Yeah.

They should be at the top, shouldn't they?

Do numbers come at the top or the bottom?

Numbers should become before A, as I understand it.

Yeah.

Buyer Munich a 15th Nick.

They're going to hate that.

FC Hollywood.

Where is this?

Where are you reading this?

What's this?

This is from Wikipedia, the trusted resource.

Right.

And actually,

I don't know what the official Bundesliga.

I bet you the official Bundesliga website does not have the league table.

There's no no way they'll bother having it.

Let's have a look.

They do have it.

Bayern Munich are top.

Oh, what have they done?

Are they just assuming?

What have they done?

Please tell us.

Hang on a minute.

This is extraordinary.

Oh my goodness.

So on the Bundesliga website, they keep the same order that it finished last season.

What, and it's all zeroed out?

Yeah.

Wow.

Presumably, the three promoted clubs are just bottom?

You're only as good as your last league table.

Don't know what's going on, but wow, fair play to the Bundesliga.

Picking up where you left off.

No problem with that.

Actually, Dave, how do you feel about this approach?

That's madness.

Is it?

Why are we so hamstrung by the alphabet in this country?

So you're saying that Liverpool should be top of the Premier League before all of these things.

I'm not saying they should.

I'm just saying it's a way of doing things.

I suppose they are.

In spirit, they are, aren't they, I guess?

Why not?

I mean, alphabetical is...

completely arbitrary, isn't it?

AFC Bournemouth are absolutely doping their way to it, aren't they?

We haven't finished, though.

Oh, we have finished.

They are the top five leagues.

There we go.

So, um, what a what a segment that was.

More interesting than I thought.

Let's stick with Wikipedia, though.

Over to Jimmy Greaves' Wikipedia page, Dave.

Uh, specifically, his style of play section.

Greaves was a prolific goalscorer and cited his relaxed attitude as his reason for his assured composure and confidence.

He also had great acceleration and pace, as well as great positional skills, clinical finishing, and opportunism inside the penalty era.

He was also an excellent dribbler.

All fairly accurate, you would say.

Yeah, yeah.

Sums up Jimmy Greaves' style quite well.

Echitus90 gets in touch and says there's been an edit to Jimmy Greaves' Wikipedia page.

To remove the word clinical from his style of play, because the editor says clinical is a daft word.

Very key is this.

Clinical is a daft word when used to describe finishing.

It means approximately the opposite of what it's taken to mean in casual usage.

Clinical medicine is the very human, patient-facing side of medicine.

Time we drop the slack, no-thought use of the word.

Cold and clean, like a clinic.

So can we get an IP address for this update?

Has it indeed come from Doha?

So they replaced clinical finishing, Nick, with excellent finishing.

Ah, come on.

Come on.

Clinical means, what do you think?

When someone says clinical finisher, what footballing scenario enters your head?

Clean through, firm finish, into the corner.

Billion percent.

Absolutely right.

Like proper, rifled into the bottom corner, no nonsense.

Past the goalkeeper.

No rounding, no chipping, no dinking.

No, no, no, no.

Not even gentle rolling.

It's buried into the corner.

Yeah.

It's a no-messing.

Yeah.

Not even any aplom.

But

incredible act of pedentry on Wikipedia, Dave.

I love this.

We touched on a clinic, didn't we, recently?

When you would talk about Player X putting on a clinic.

I didn't realize that in the medical sense, a clinical was what this guy was saying it.

Neither did I.

So is the distinction between clinical and surgical?

I don't know.

I I guess.

Yeah.

Surgical finishing.

But no, yeah.

Oxford Dictionary says the secondary definition of clinical is very efficient and without feeling, coldly detached.

So let's just let language flourish.

Wikipedia editor, what a thing to get preoccupied.

I mean, obviously, there must be a hint of irony in it.

It must be.

I don't know.

Don't know.

It's someone who's taken the time to edit Jim Greaves' Wikipedia page, so, you know.

Time we dropped the slack, no-thought use of the word.

Wow.

Anyway, love this from Charles dave he says i've just been doing some recruitment at work and sifting through some cvs when i've come across a cv saying he has had two spells at tesco surely a spell is limited to a football player and no other job role it really made me chuckle you can't you can't just chuck in two spells at tesco on your cv presumably that's just then as part of a sort of personal bio rather than it just being listed in terms of his then you scroll down to the bottom of the cv you actually see the full breakdown of all of your appearances yeah just have his league goals at the top.

Keen to know whether it was the same store

in the second spell.

Yeah.

They say never go back, but if you know the store,

let's go do it.

Why not?

Yeah.

Oh, dear.

Right.

This came from Adam Rosenbaum.

It's just a lovely slice of Andy Townsend on Talk Sport.

Nothing special.

Just some bread and butter Townsendian goodness.

We were speaking just a bit before we come on here about young players from my so when I was my era, when I was at Southampton, Shira and the and Letitia, Matty and Big Al both were training with the with the reserves as it was then, or even the youth team, and got the

got that one and the curly finger.

Over you come, you're training now with the big boys.

The curly finger.

If you constructed a fake Andy Townsend quote, I think all of those elements would be in there.

I love the fact that he gave Shira and Letitier their talk sport names as well.

Yeah, Matty and Big Al.

Is Letitia a Matty?

I'm not asking Daddy's a Matty.

You know, before or after his head's gone the moment.

It's just wonderful.

The curly finger, the little whistle.

Everything's great.

I love it, Nick.

Curly finger and the, you know, this one.

Not ideal for an audio medium, but he then pulled it right back with a curly finger.

You know, exactly what he means.

Just a

great voice.

And only Townsend could really do this and pull this off, really, couldn't he?

But the curly finger, because it could be.

He's talking about it as in it's like something that you aspire to.

Oh, lads, I've got the curly finger.

I'm up to play with the first team.

But couldn't the curly finger also be, come here, like, you're in trouble?

I sort of see it as being summoned from the touchline to come on as a substitute rather than

no.

Nigel, no.

That manager is not like arcing his neck, looking down the touchline, giving a sub the curly finger either.

No, no, no.

No, how do you summon a substitute from

it?

Yeah, it's a hand wave.

It's not not the curly finger.

Come on.

That's too weird.

It's weird.

That's obvious.

Yeah,

that was unwritten.

But come on, Dave, now you are going to...

When the Rebelsdale season starts, you're going to incorporate the curly finger, surely.

Yeah.

I am going to dish out a few curly fingers this season, I think.

Oh, God.

Right, our preoccupation continues with the film Saipan, starring Steve Coogan as Mick McCarthy.

Nick, it will celebrate its world premiere at the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival next month, screening as part of the centerpiece program, which recognises the best of international cinema.

Is it fitting that Saipan, the story of Roy Keene and Mick McCarthy's contretante before the 2002 World Cup, should take place at a festival whose acronym is TIFF?

Lovely.

Class!

That's nice.

We should go.

Can we go?

Yeah.

Let's get there.

Let's get to the premiere.

Six South Lights, something like that.

Fair enough.

Very reasonable prices on some of those flights, I think.

I really hope that the facilities are up to standard for Steve Coogan.

Yeah.

It'd be a real shame if they weren't.

I can't remember any of the quotes from the thing to turn this into a joke, but let's assume it's happened.

Yeah, completely agree.

Right, finally, and sticking to the travel theme, this came from Chris Lepkowski.

He says, a question.

For those people going on holiday, do they spend the final couple of days before jetting off wearing only their second string clothes to ensure their first choice are kept fresh for travels?

Or is it just me?

No, spot on.

Exactly what you should do.

I'd probably only do this 24 hours ahead.

I would only think the day before, Nick.

I wouldn't plan any further ahead.

But yeah, I'm definitely wearing the clothes that are being kept back.

The Gascoignet France 98.

Yeah, yeah, 100% do.

I'm a little bit further in advance than 24 hours as well, because what if you wear a kind of first string t-shirt on a Wednesday, you're going to weigh on a Friday?

You've got to get that washed, haven't you?

So, you know, you're not giving yourself a huge amount of time.

Dave, I know you enjoy the moments where I reveal myself as a complete weirdo, and this won't surprise you, but I came back from my yurt holiday with seven spare pairs of pants

completely clean.

So you took all the standby players out with you.

Yeah, you never know.

Just never know what's going to happen.

I had this conversation with my wife after my trip to Belgium at the weekend.

She was astonished that

I didn't have any spare pants with me, that

I had taken the exact and worn the exact number of pants.

It's like a 1.2 situation.

You want a better than a goal of game situation with your your pants when you're going on holiday.

Definitely.

I mean, without kind of prying into your personal circumstances, how often do you do you use the spare pair?

The kind of, you know, the, the, or is it more of a kind of, you know, you just know that you're prepared for any eventuality?

I note your curious tone and I will indulge it.

I treat.

holiday days as kind of two days, like a double-header.

They're like the Liverpool friendly against athletic Pilbatto.

You have the early part of the day, you go out and you go and see things and what, what, what, and, and typically, you come back for a rest.

Everyone comes back for a rest.

It turns into like a three-hour snooze and you've wasted the day.

But fundamentally, that's how it works.

To me, the day starts again.

New pants, new day, and then that's when the sort of afternoon and evening begin.

So

you can't argue with it, really.

Fresh pants are a nice feeling.

They are, but it just seems about necessary.

Seven extra pairs was complete madness.

I don't know what happened there.

But, you know, I kept squeezing them into the suitcase.

And now, Dave, out of a moment of pure Instagram boredom, I bought one of those vacuum packs for suitcases which sucks all the air out.

Bring on the tour.

I'll pack your clothes if you want.

And Charlie's.

I'm a packing cubes guy now.

I've got packing cubes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Elite.

Elite packer.

Great stuff.

Thanks to you, Nick Miller.

Thank you.

Thanks to you, Dave Walker.

Thank you.

Thanks to everyone for listening.

We'll be back on Tuesday.

See you then.

This podcast is part of the Sports Social Podcast Network.

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