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

Speaker 1 Did you know you can opt out of winter? With Verbo, save up to $1,500 for booking a month-long stay. When thousands of sunny homes are waiting for you, why subject yourself to the cold?

Speaker 1 Put the snow shovel down, put the parko back in the closet, and don't you dare scrape another windshield.

Speaker 1 Slip into some flip-flops, consider a sunless tan, and use the monthly stays filter to save up to $1,500.

Speaker 1 Book your warm getaway at Verbo.com.

Speaker 3 When you own your own business, you need to keep things moving. Need to book a last-minute flight?

Speaker 4 Earn a $300 travel credit to cover that.

Speaker 3 Need to take a meeting before takeoff?

Speaker 5 Do it from the comfort of the Chase Sapphire Lounge by the club.

Speaker 3 Need to catch your breath before you board?

Speaker 2 Huh. Done.

Speaker 3 With $2,500 in annual value, the new Chase Sapphire Reserve for Business is the card that gives back all you put in.

Speaker 2 Visit chase.com slash reserve business to learn more.

Speaker 6 Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank and a member of DIC subject to credit approval terms apply.

Speaker 7 Starting your business isn't just about opening the doors. It's keeping the dream you built secure.

Speaker 5 With New York Life, you get the financial guidance to make it real.

Speaker 9 Start today at nyl.com.

Speaker 11 I'm sorry, you can sit there and look and play with all your silly machines as much as you like.

Speaker 12 Is Gas going to have a crack?

Speaker 2 Yes, you know. Oh, I think.

Speaker 2 Brilliant!

Speaker 2 But jeez! He's round the goalkeeper! He's done it!

Speaker 2 Absolutely incredible!

Speaker 2 He launched himself six feet into the crowd and Kung Fu kicked a supporter who was eye without a shadow of a doubt getting him lip. Oh, I say,

Speaker 2 it's amazing! He does it tame and tame and tame again. Break up the music! Charge a glass!

Speaker 2 This nation is going to dance all night!

Speaker 14 Wrexham, welcome to Connor Cody.

Speaker 15 Half-assed gambling advert spiel, Jeremy Corbyn on allotments.

Speaker 13 Stephen Warnock makes a pig's ear of a cliché.

Speaker 17 How do we feel about double-header-friendlies?

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 4 Brought to your ears by Gohanger Podcasts. This is Football Clichés.

Speaker 15 Hello, everyone, and welcome to Football Clichés.

Speaker 17 I'm Adam Hurry. This is the midweek adjudication panel.
Joining me is David Walker.

Speaker 22 How are you doing?

Speaker 23 I'm good.

Speaker 14 And Nick Miller, how are you?

Speaker 24 Very well. Excellent.

Speaker 25 I have got a bit of an update off the back of last week's listeners' MHD episode.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 And it turns out I'm not a million miles away, but I should perhaps have had a bit more faith in

Speaker 25 the youngsters. So listener Christian, he got in touch with me and he said it's actually a ventilation issue.
All right.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 But basically, most football grounds don't have the required ventilation that you need.

Speaker 28 What a boring answer, but makes perfect sense.

Speaker 17 I mean, yeah, 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.

Speaker 31 And that is famously unwell-ventilated places.

Speaker 2 Classic, yeah, classically, sort of directly underneath the the seating as well so you don't want to you don't want to be ventilating you know oil or whatever up in right into the seats do you quite quite nice footbally smell to waft up though wouldn't it chips and you'd make people hungry and they want to go back and down and buy them exactly yeah it's like sainsby's pumping in the bread smell

Speaker 35 yeah the next new stadium is going to boast chippy ventilation uh now nick among the best correspondence i received before this episode was a tweet from former notting forest forward turned rock star Paul McGregor, who objected to being described on last week's clichés quiz as a waif.

Speaker 2 Yes, I saw this. I'm standing with you on this one.
I think he was quite wafy. He was very wafy.
He's a very, very sort of slim, not massively tall guy. So, yeah, I think you're fine.

Speaker 25 Yeah. I'm just having a look at him now to see whether I agree with him or you.
Is he wafy? He's sort of got quite wafy hair. You know, it was sort of sort of wispy.

Speaker 2 Yeah, wispy hair. Wispy and wafy.
Wispy and wafy.

Speaker 25 I guess a little bit wafy.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 25 Yeah, this won't be the first act of pedantry on this episode.

Speaker 38 A reminder, of course, that you can join us on tour in 2025.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 31 A footballer's names in things popped up yesterday that I'm saving for the live show because it's so good.

Speaker 18 And if that's not a reason to turn up, I don't know what is.

Speaker 6 So come and join us.

Speaker 25 I am looking forward to it. As you said the other day, only two months ago now, which, you know, starting to

Speaker 25 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 before. It's on Sunday, the 12th of October.

Speaker 25 And this led me initially to think whether any listeners who would be so minded to get involved in a potential cliché's 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.

Speaker 10 Oh, I fear for you.

Speaker 2 It's a hell of a stint, that inner slight spanner in the works.

Speaker 25 It's in the international break, so there won't be.

Speaker 25 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 were playing on the Sunday or something, but it's not quite as

Speaker 25 might have to watch the F1.

Speaker 41 Oh, God.

Speaker 42 Oh, you are.

Speaker 42 That sounds like one of the worst days of my life already.

Speaker 25 Watching the F1 in 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 is starting to be a thing you're seeing people and it's always the mclaren fans in their orange t-shirts

Speaker 41 is it on the little chalkboards outside

Speaker 8 rubbish uh that's put people off don't put people off come to the live shows tickets.football clichés.com right time for the midweek adjudication panel quite simply nick connor 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.

Speaker 8 I love playing with good people, I love being around good people, and that's what's certainly here at this football club.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 That's another thing that I'm really thankful for for the football club.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 And for me, I'll give you everything. I'll give you everything every single day of my life life of of being at wrexham being part of this football club being excited to be part of this football club

Speaker 2 i mean

Speaker 47 it's got everything you could possibly hope for from a connocody interview nick um jack copper of listenfairplay.com fame has done his analysis on this interview uh five minutes and 28 seconds this interview is and conner cody reels off seven football clubs which is 1.28 football clubs per minute astonishingly there are an additional 16 instances of of a club, the club or this club, which I actually did not include in my montage slash analysis.

Speaker 17 I let those slide but they are very much part of the kind of wider earnest tapestry of being Conor Cody.

Speaker 21 So let's get to the crux of this.

Speaker 31 Now 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.

Speaker 6 So

Speaker 49 he's getting better.

Speaker 17 He's showing no signs of slowing down.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 50 But I mean, Dave, this is perfect.

Speaker 27 The perfect combination of player and club to beat his record, I think.

Speaker 25 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.
It's almost as if he sort of knows what he's doing.

Speaker 25 Surely this must have been mentioned to him at some point.

Speaker 25 I mean, it's mad, really.

Speaker 50 He's just a lovely bloke. He gets away with it.

Speaker 2 I'm all right with him.

Speaker 36 I think Connor Cody's just a tremendous man.

Speaker 54 I really like him.

Speaker 25 Yeah, no, I think you're right. I think it does feel genuine for sure.
But

Speaker 25 at one point, Rico says, I'll give you everything every day of my life.

Speaker 2 The whole interview is like that, Nick.

Speaker 37 There's proverbial brick walls everywhere.

Speaker 2 It's wedding vows.

Speaker 50 In sickness and in health.

Speaker 55 Richer, poorer. Don't mind.

Speaker 2 Do you think that you say it's his last move, but do you think this kind of this persona that he's obviously is this designed to actually extend his career beyond any kind of like normal football career would?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 25 Yeah, and also, like, coaching, managerial career,

Speaker 25 he can do it. Yeah, for as long as he's in the game, this can keep happening.

Speaker 17 He actually spends a large portion of this interview essentially framing himself as someone who's great around the dressing room.

Speaker 17 Like he says, I'm going to come in, set the standards every day, and that sort of stuff.

Speaker 21 So he barely talks about playing at all.

Speaker 37 Although he is raring to get started.

Speaker 31 Of course he is.

Speaker 25 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 a laughing there. I'll tell some jokes.

Speaker 6 You know, banter. Oh, bless him.

Speaker 22 Yeah, great man, and great to see.

Speaker 6 He's keeping his numbers up.

Speaker 17 Right, this came from Jesus Freak.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 29 Well Oliver, how was that for a Rangers debut?

Speaker 56 Yeah it was it was great.

Speaker 56 No not three points.

Speaker 29 We won.

Speaker 2 That's the most important thing.

Speaker 37 Dave, great to see someone finally correcting themselves.

Speaker 30 It's a classic pitfall.

Speaker 44 It happens all the time.

Speaker 43 This is the byproduct of autopilot post-match football interviews.

Speaker 17 Finally, someone has had the self-awareness to take a step back and say, do you know what?

Speaker 2 No, no, it's not right.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 Even when he was laughing, he still got in, obviously, the win is the most important thing.

Speaker 57 I mean, just getting the points, getting the three points, Nick, is just so core to the football interview experience.

Speaker 23 If you can't have that, you're lost.

Speaker 2 A couple of rounds from him being accurate as there. It sort of seemed to serve as a lovely little sort of tension breaker as well.
He was quite seemed quite stiff.

Speaker 2 Maybe he hasn't really done many of these kind of post-master interviews before.

Speaker 2 But then, when he realized, oh, what a gaff! Then he had a nice little laugh, and everyone was relaxed afterwards.

Speaker 30 Yeah, teammate next to him joining in, it was just fantastic.

Speaker 31 Yeah, feel-good factor everywhere.

Speaker 46 Speaking of autopilot half-assed football chat, here is an excerpt from a Skybet podcast advert.

Speaker 37 This is basically it in its entirety, actually.

Speaker 25 XG,

Speaker 25 park the bus,

Speaker 25 Put it in the mixer.

Speaker 25 How's your touch?

Speaker 25 Wand of a left foot.

Speaker 25 On the beach. Fergie time.

Speaker 25 Top bins. Limbs.
Hang it in the live.

Speaker 25 It's not for everyone. It's for the fans.

Speaker 2 What?

Speaker 2 That's it?

Speaker 2 We just reeled off some phrases.

Speaker 41 Some of them were on vogue, some aren't.

Speaker 38 What's the point?

Speaker 2 It reminds me a little bit of. I remember going to see Morrissey many years ago before he's, you know, before he'd said most of the really bad stuff.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And it was one of the weirdest things I've ever heard. And that's kind of a sort of lighter version of that.

Speaker 31 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?

Speaker 51 Rubbish.

Speaker 25 Yeah, not quite sure what the point was.

Speaker 36 It's for the fans, just for the fans.

Speaker 25 But a nice selection, though, I would say.

Speaker 2 Yeah, pretty broad, pretty broad selection.

Speaker 34 Yeah, a few quibbles, but uh, we'll move on.

Speaker 15 Next up, Dave, this is Jeremy Corbyn on allotments.

Speaker 31 He says, Of course, social housing is desperately needed, but we need not sacrifice these vital green spaces to build it.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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?

Speaker 21 The Stoke chat has reached allotments. This is great.

Speaker 59 February's good for this, I think.

Speaker 25 Yeah, Sunday afternoon as well.

Speaker 2 Yeah, classic allotment territory, surely.

Speaker 25 I think so. I had a look, actually.
There are 80 different allotment sites in Stoke-on-Trent.

Speaker 2 So plenty of potential for this to go the whole hog.

Speaker 36 Roy Delap chucking his turnips as far as he can.

Speaker 43 Right.

Speaker 17 This came from Danny Wilson.

Speaker 46 Here is Stephen Warnock on Five Live talking about Chelsea's youthful squad.

Speaker 4 Now, Chelsea, a lot of fans might argue and say, well, we 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.

Speaker 30 Nick, for my own sanity, please confirm he says pigs and troughs.

Speaker 2 Yep, pretty sure he said pigs and troughs there. Lovely.

Speaker 2 Sort of works.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 59 Does it work?

Speaker 2 Maybe it does work.

Speaker 35 I love pigs and their troughs.

Speaker 2 The pig is the pig is eating from the trough. Yeah.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 the trough is below, and it could work, could work.

Speaker 54 I'm sorry to Stephen Warup, but I mean, it feels like really cool.

Speaker 35 I'm not. I just want to slightly entertain the idea that the phrase could be pigs and troughs, and we've been saying it wrong all this time.

Speaker 6 Brilliant.

Speaker 37 Right, more straightforward now.

Speaker 23 This came from Billy Clark, Dave.

Speaker 17 Here is the sound of Grimsby's Cameron McJanet doubling their lead against Crawley in League Two on Saturday.

Speaker 35 That should be the new Ellis James crowd noise.

Speaker 46 But

Speaker 14 more pertinently, Dave, what a thumping header sound that is, by the way.

Speaker 25 Yeah, proper thumper.

Speaker 27 Lovely sound.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 2 All right, Troy Dini.

Speaker 10 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 25 Don't you think they sound really hard? Yeah. Like that sounds like you're just gonna, you know, sticking your head on that.

Speaker 24 I hate a properly pumped up ball, Nick.

Speaker 14 I want a bit of give to my, you know, polyurethane.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and you but but also when you're 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah. But there is always an element of that.
And I don't know whether that's the just the lack of skill involved in the person kicking the ball or the ball itself. But yeah,

Speaker 2 you never hear that sound that satisfying in anything other than professional football.

Speaker 25 It's such a sweet spot though, isn't it? Because even just a little bit underinflated from what from where you want it to be is terrible. Yeah.
And it just ruins the feel of it. I just don't like it.

Speaker 25 But if you just go a little bit over, again, I think it ruins it on the other end. One of our

Speaker 25 the assistant manager at Ribblesdale, he's a bit of a gadgetman.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 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 like do the old sort of hand pumping thing and it's got like a little reader of the is it a psi yeah

Speaker 2 so you get it like bang on and he did that with all our balls and they're just too hard yeah that just it's not fun it is it's harder to control it's not as satisfying you want it to you want it to embrace your foot to an extent not to sort of you know angrily confront it uh but but it particularly at five of 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.

Speaker 2 He says, Ball's flat, lads, balls flat. You gotta go and pump this up.

Speaker 25 Playing with a flat ball, I mean, it's

Speaker 6 just awful as well. But yeah, there we are.

Speaker 17 But yeah, if yeah, if they ban heading, then this sound is gonna go as well.

Speaker 23 Well, that's that'll be a real shame.

Speaker 39 Little footballers' names in things for you.

Speaker 16 This came from Colin, the great Colin.

Speaker 17 It's from a YouTube live stream of planes landing at Leeds Bradford Airport during storm florists.

Speaker 11 So I think the pilot of this is called Mike Newell.

Speaker 11 Doing good so far.

Speaker 38 There you go.

Speaker 2 Similarly, retrograde views on female pilots, presumably.

Speaker 17 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 for labels.

Speaker 23 You'd want that to be your headline, wouldn't you?

Speaker 25 But no, I don't think we can rule out that it's him.

Speaker 25 He could just be an amateur pilot in his retirement.

Speaker 14 Joy, he looks quite commercial airline pilot, Mike Newell.

Speaker 29 Yeah, he did in his pomp.

Speaker 2 You see what you mean, actually. Yeah.

Speaker 49 Slick looking. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Could be. Right.

Speaker 42 Next up, Liverpool played athletic Bill Bow in a double header at Anfield on Monday night, Nick.

Speaker 39 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 the first game that had finished about an hour before, surely that's not applicable here.

Speaker 60 You can't have that. No, no.

Speaker 2 First goal that Liverpool scored against Bill Bow since four o'clock this afternoon.

Speaker 46 No, Dave, we rail against sort of tenuous stats about things that happened in 1948.

Speaker 30 We can't have it both ways, can we?

Speaker 25 No, no, of course not.

Speaker 47 The last meeting.

Speaker 25 It's the same meeting. Yeah.
Isn't it?

Speaker 2 It's not, even though it's a double header.

Speaker 25 It's not a double-header, it's the same meeting.

Speaker 39 Yeah, I mean, actually, yeah.

Speaker 5 Nick, how do we feel about these double-header friendlies tearing at the tapestry of the structure of football?

Speaker 39 I've heard of there have been friendlies where they've played three halves of 45 minutes.

Speaker 2 What?

Speaker 39 Yeah, just to give more players some game time.

Speaker 31 So they play three lots of 45 minutes and call it one game.

Speaker 2 The double header is very kind of, I mean, well, the three halves thing is mental.

Speaker 2 The double header thing is quite sort of family fun day, isn't it? I imagine

Speaker 2 there was inflatable stuff in the car park.

Speaker 14 And you need that stuff for a double header, Dave.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 18 I'm also thinking about the Emirates Cup here when there's two games in one day.

Speaker 36 It's hard to sit through two games of football.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 52 It's difficult.

Speaker 30 It's like watching four games in a World Cup day.

Speaker 38 It's like, well, I've done this.

Speaker 25 Yeah, and I think you need there to be a junior and senior partner of this

Speaker 25 thing. Ideally, the first game would be a bit of a warm-up.

Speaker 38 Starter and main.

Speaker 25 Yeah, exactly. Two standard 60-minute games is a bit weird.

Speaker 2 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 have done these double headers where

Speaker 2 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, the women's game is always kind of much more entertaining.

Speaker 25 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

Speaker 25 great, but it'd just be too much almost. Too much going on.

Speaker 50 Yeah, that's too much.

Speaker 32 I mean, I couldn't sit sit and watch four hours of sort of live football being sort of assembled and dismantled twice.

Speaker 17 But I could handle maybe like an under-18s game and then the men's senior teams.

Speaker 31 You need that, as you said, Dave, that sort of dynamic of starter at main, basically.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 53 Yeah, that's too big a combination.

Speaker 17 But someone in a commercial team somewhere is thinking about it. Speaking of which, this episode is brought to you in association with NordVPN.

Speaker 17 For those who don't know, VPN stands for virtual private network. It secures your connection, protecting your personal information and online activity, especially on public Wi-Fi.

Speaker 46 A VPN can also make your phone or laptop appear as if it's in another country, which is great for accessing content while travelling.

Speaker 17 On that note, here is Celta Vigo's Iago Aspas just sat down at training listing the 2015-16 Leicester City squad.

Speaker 14 I would pay good money to hear Iago Espas just on stage just saying Demarai Gray's name in that way.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 What a player he was, by the way.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 54 Come along, Iago.

Speaker 25 Let's get you on stage. I love the way that he

Speaker 25 lingered on Albright and then he looked up, Nick. You're right.

Speaker 26 He did look up to his teammates.

Speaker 25 Was it Marcus Alonso?

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 6 I didn't know he was at Celta Vega.

Speaker 25 Yeah. And that was like a real sort of game-nose game.

Speaker 25 All Brighton, though, yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 5 The spirit of this podcast really does appeal to people just sitting down listing players' names.

Speaker 17 If you want to try NordVPN for yourself, go to nordvpn.com slash cliches, and our link will also give you four extra months on the two-year plan.

Speaker 5 It's the best discount available.

Speaker 61 There's no risk with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee, and the link is also in our podcast description if you need it.

Speaker 2 We'll be back very shortly.

Speaker 63 For over 30 years, Islamic Relief USA has been working together for a better world.

Speaker 63 From earthquakes and famine abroad to hurricanes and wildfires here at home, we've responded to hundreds of disasters, serving over 7 million people last year across more than 40 countries.

Speaker 63 But we don't stop at emergency relief. We deliver long-term solutions that transform communities and bring hope to future generations.
Our vision: a world free of poverty.

Speaker 63 Join us at irusa.org and help build a better tomorrow. That's irusa.org.

Speaker 63 Oh, look at that!

Speaker 63 That is wonderful!

Speaker 30 Welcome back to Football Clichés.

Speaker 46 This is the Midweek Adjudication Panel.

Speaker 31 A reminder: if you go to dreamland.football clichés.com, you can sign up for our exclusive membership.

Speaker 46 For $5.99 a month, you get two episodes a month of Dreamland, our exclusive news show.

Speaker 17 Episode 5 in the works for the start of the new season.

Speaker 64 You also get pre-sale access to Football Clichés' live events and free entry to clichés quiz live events as well.

Speaker 32 Right, next up, news that Darwin Nunez is close to an agreement with Al-Hillal, Nick.

Speaker 14 Fabrizio Romano says it's 350% done between the clubs.

Speaker 10 Again, a very precise exaggeration.

Speaker 2 Why? What a figure to pick out of the earth.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 23 This is like Trump saying he's reduced drug prices in the US by 1500%, Dave.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 12 You know, we've cut drug prices by 1200, 1,300, 1,400, 1,500%.

Speaker 25 I mean, yeah, as we now come to expect from Romano, completely and utterly ludicrous.

Speaker 25 It's just getting out of control. Wasn't there one the other day where he was reporting on an email being replied to?

Speaker 6 Lovely little detail.

Speaker 23 Lovely little details in there from Romano.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 51 He's flat out.

Speaker 25 Is he just being CC'd into the emails now?

Speaker 25 Is that it? Just why not? Just get him in there. Just copy him into all correspondence.
He's going to find out anyway.

Speaker 21 25 million followers on Twitter, Nick.

Speaker 23 What would you do with that?

Speaker 2 I just think it can't be him all the time.

Speaker 2 There must be like... So I know of a

Speaker 2 there's a a comedian called the boy with the tape boy with tape on his face.

Speaker 2 He's quite big in America now. And now he he has got like another.

Speaker 2 He's sort of franchised himself. So there's another fellow who does the broadly the same act who he kind of sends out to do other gigs.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 He's got he's got some other ones that does this kind of I mean I'm sure he has a social media team and all that kind kind of thing, but it just feels like he can't be doing all of this at the same time.

Speaker 2 So he must have sort of other versions of himself.

Speaker 38 I mean, I stopped short of calling the whole thing depressing.

Speaker 23 I don't want to get too cynical about the whole thing, but the idea of a Fabrizio Romano franchise out there, which is like a...

Speaker 41 God, geez.

Speaker 23 Anyway, right, this was quite interesting from Alternative Car6159 on Reddit.

Speaker 26 He's noticed an Albanian team called FC Dinamo City.

Speaker 17 He says, are there any other team names made up of purely prefixes or suffixes of other teams?

Speaker 52 I mean incredible hat-trick Nick.

Speaker 31 No one can find another hat-trick of prefix suffixes in a team name after FC Dynamo City.

Speaker 26 Reyes of Davis says forest green rovers.

Speaker 37 I'm not having green.

Speaker 45 I'm not having green. Sorry.

Speaker 32 Even Forest is pretty tenuous.

Speaker 23 It's only one club.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 you

Speaker 2 would probably guess at Eastern Europe somewhere, but you have you you if you were just faced with the the name, you had absolutely no concept of where they were from.

Speaker 65 There's um swimming pay 8509, says Dave.

Speaker 2 There's a club in the Philippines called United City FC, which is about as generic as you could get.

Speaker 25 Yeah, proper computer game stuff, that isn't it.

Speaker 35 United computer game badge as well, just a football with some stars on it.

Speaker 25 I mean I I'd love to know more about it though, actually. What how how has this club come about, United City FC? Is it a new thing?

Speaker 25 Is it uh an amateur thing and i say even the same for for fc dynamo city because dynamo

Speaker 49 are they usually the police teams cska is the army locomotive is the trains obviously startec is the workers dynamo's the army no hang on dynamo is i think it's police is it i think dynamo moscow the police yeah we're all looking we're all googling it at the very same time jonathan wilson's going to unleash this on a quit to us on a quiz one day we should know this.

Speaker 22 We'll remember this day.

Speaker 16 Interior Ministry.

Speaker 46 Yeah, it's basically police.

Speaker 25 So they are essentially the Albanian version of the Metropolitan Police.

Speaker 25 Have they gone out of the first round of the extra preliminary stage of the Albanian FA Cup?

Speaker 23 Really hope they've got an extra preliminary round of the Albanian Cup.

Speaker 42 Oh, lovely.

Speaker 33 Okay, if you thought we weren't mid-week adjudication panelly enough, here's this from Andrew Richardson.

Speaker 44 He says, this may be too boring to make it on.

Speaker 53 No, but I was looking at the 2025-26 League Earth table in its current state of alphabetical order.

Speaker 57 And Le Havre are in fourth place.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 57 Nick, this is insane.

Speaker 58 Insane, I tell you.

Speaker 2 You feel like something should be done about this as well. There are lots of L's in League A on there.
So there's your problem.

Speaker 15 But they're not relying on Le, you know, they're not relying on that.

Speaker 53 There's Lans, there's Lille, there's Lorion, Lyon, very L-heavy.

Speaker 25 As you cans, get them up there. Big time.
Anyone know any French cities begin with D?

Speaker 2 Dijon. Dijon, yeah.

Speaker 39 Dunkirk.

Speaker 31 Very mid-table heavy in the alphabet. Loads of L's, loads of M's and Ns.

Speaker 18 That takes up the, you know, entire swathe of their division.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 39 But so, yeah, so

Speaker 50 I took the trouble of looking at the top five European leagues and to see how they're alphabetically distributed.

Speaker 17 So, the Premier League.

Speaker 25 An early check on the standings.

Speaker 25 Pre-embryonic league.

Speaker 23 Pre-embryonic, exactly.

Speaker 41 That's what I was after.

Speaker 30 The Premier League is fairly well distributed, Nick.

Speaker 31 You've got your A's, your B's, your C's.

Speaker 35 Then, as is always the case, there's a big jump to Everton.

Speaker 31 Fulham always plugged this gap a little bit, and then you're in the L's straight away.

Speaker 39 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.

Speaker 2 It's when the alphabet gets started in earnest, really, doesn't it?

Speaker 43 They come thick and fast after that.

Speaker 2 It's the business end of the

Speaker 25 z is the business end of the alphabet, really, isn't it?

Speaker 2 I would say so.

Speaker 31 But yeah, so the Premier League holding up quite well, Nick, I would say.

Speaker 65 You get bogged down in the L's and M's a little bit.

Speaker 17 Manchester City and Manchester United are always gonna stop you in your tracks a little bit, but yeah, relatively well distributed, wouldn't you agree?

Speaker 2 I mean, you've done the research, so I can't quibble with that.

Speaker 17 No, well, let's move on to Serie R now, then, Dave, because they've got A's, B's, C's, then F, G, H, I, J, L,

Speaker 33 N, P,

Speaker 61 R, S, T, U.

Speaker 52 Not bad.

Speaker 25 A lesser spotted U.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 14 That's true. No Ds.

Speaker 52 No D's in Italy.

Speaker 58 Italian cities.

Speaker 46 Beginning with D.

Speaker 38 It's not happening, is it? Dead air.

Speaker 49 Right. Over to La Liga.

Speaker 2 Where's Horncastle?

Speaker 47 A, B, C, E, G, L, M, O.

Speaker 37 Loads of Rs.

Speaker 31 And they're all prefixed.

Speaker 28 So there's,

Speaker 18 we'll get onto this in a moment, but that feels like cheating.

Speaker 31 A couple of Vs.

Speaker 25 So, Betis, get them up there.

Speaker 22 Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, speaking of which, over to the Bundesliga, which is an absolute mess, by the way.

Speaker 38 Augsburger top, fine.

Speaker 49 Then Union Berlin.

Speaker 2 What? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Speaker 58 Exactly.

Speaker 2 Hang on a minute.

Speaker 2 How's that happened?

Speaker 30 They treat their prefixes sort of quite lightly.

Speaker 17 So

Speaker 15 Berlin is second, Bremen a third, despite being Verde Bremen.

Speaker 59 Then it's Barusia Dortmund.

Speaker 2 Whoa, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 2 What are they playing at here? This is dreadful.

Speaker 17 To be fair, Brusia Dortmund are there legitimately because they're D, so I've mixed that up.

Speaker 54 Yeah.

Speaker 23 And then you're down with the one dot lot. One FC Heidenheim, one FC Kohlm.

Speaker 37 I don't know what letter they're using.

Speaker 2 Well, they're using H and K, but they should be at the top, shouldn't they?

Speaker 25 Do numbers come at the top or the bottom?

Speaker 44 Numbers should become before A, as I understand it.

Speaker 30 Yeah.

Speaker 45 Buy Munich a 15th Nick.

Speaker 23 They're going to hate that, FC Hollywood.

Speaker 2 Where is this? Where are you reading this?

Speaker 58 What's this?

Speaker 5 This is from Wikipedia, the trusted resource.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 Actually,

Speaker 39 I don't know what the official Bundesliga.

Speaker 5 I bet you the official Bundesliga website does not have the league table.

Speaker 2 There's no way they'll bother having it.

Speaker 46 Let's have a look. They do have it.

Speaker 45 Buyer Munich a top. Oh, what have they done? Are they just assuming?

Speaker 25 What have they done? Please tell us. Hang on a minute.

Speaker 16 This is extraordinary.

Speaker 30 Oh my goodness. So on the Bundesliga website, they keep the same order that it finished last season.

Speaker 25 What?

Speaker 38 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 fillet to the Bundesliga that picking up where you left off no problem with that actually Dave how do you feel about this approach

Speaker 25 uh 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 is 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?

Speaker 58 Why not?

Speaker 22 I mean alphabetical is completely arbitrary, isn't it?

Speaker 23 AFC Bournemouth are absolutely doping their way to it, aren't they?

Speaker 58 We haven't finished though.

Speaker 44 Oh we have finished.

Speaker 48 They are the top five leagues.

Speaker 14 There we go. So

Speaker 38 what a segment that was.

Speaker 37 More interesting than I thought.

Speaker 17 Let's stick with Wikipedia though.

Speaker 32 Over to Jimmy Greaves' Wikipedia page Dave.

Speaker 18 Specifically his style of play section.

Speaker 31 Greaves was a prolific goalscorer and cited his relaxed attitude as his reason for his assured composure and confidence.

Speaker 17 He also had great acceleration and pace as well as great positional skills, clinical finishing and opportunism inside the penalty era.

Speaker 24 He was also an excellent dribbler.

Speaker 57 All fairly accurate you would say.

Speaker 17 Yeah yeah. Sums up Jimmy Greaves' style quite well.

Speaker 36 Echitus90 gets in touch and says there's been an edit to Jimmy Greaves' Wikipedia page.

Speaker 65 To remove the word clinical.

Speaker 49 from his style of play because the editor says clinical is a daft word.

Speaker 30 Very key is this.

Speaker 53 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.

Speaker 16 Clinical medicine is the very human, patient-facing side of medicine. Time we drop the slack, no-thought use of the word.

Speaker 25 Cold and clean, like a clinic.

Speaker 25 So can we can we get an IP address for this update?

Speaker 25 Has it indeed come from Doha?

Speaker 44 So they replaced clinical finishing, Nick, with excellent finishing.

Speaker 2 Nah, come on. Come on.

Speaker 59 Clinical means what do you think?

Speaker 52 When someone says clinical finisher, what footballing scenario enters your head?

Speaker 2 Clean through, firm finish, into the corner.

Speaker 26 Billion percent.

Speaker 34 Absolutely right.

Speaker 15 Like proper rifled into the bottom corner, no nonsense.

Speaker 65 Past the goalkeeper.

Speaker 39 No rounding, no chipping, no dinking.

Speaker 26 No, no, no, no.

Speaker 16 Not even, not even gentle rolling. It's buried into the corner.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It's a no-messing.
Yeah.

Speaker 15 Not even any aplom.

Speaker 10 But

Speaker 36 incredible act of pedantry on Wikipedia, Dave.

Speaker 25 I love this. We touched on a clinic, didn't we, recently, When you would talk about Player X putting on a clinic.

Speaker 25 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?

Speaker 2 I guess.

Speaker 46 Yeah. Surgical finishing.

Speaker 39 But no, yeah.

Speaker 51 Oxford Dictionary says the secondary definition of clinical is very efficient and without feeling coldly detached.

Speaker 58 So let's just let language flourish. Wikipedia editor, what a thing to get preoccupied.

Speaker 30 I mean, obviously there must be a hint of irony in it.

Speaker 47 It must be.

Speaker 2 I don't know. Don't know.
It's someone who's taken the time to edit Jim Greaves' Wikipedia page, so, you know.

Speaker 34 Time we dropped the slack, no-thought use of the word.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 16 Anyway, love this from Charles.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 54 Surely a spell is limited to a football player and no other job role.

Speaker 22 It really made me chuckle.

Speaker 30 You can't, you can't just chuck in two spells at Tesco on your CV.

Speaker 25 Presumably, that's just then as part of a sort of personal bio rather than just being listed in terms of his.

Speaker 25 Then you scroll down to the bottom of the CV, you actually see the full breakdown of all of your appearances.

Speaker 6 Yeah, it would just have his league goals at the top.

Speaker 25 Keen to know whether it was the same store

Speaker 25 in a second spell. Yeah.
They say never go back, but if he knows the store,

Speaker 2 Tesco Joe.

Speaker 58 Why not?

Speaker 2 Yeah. Oh, dear.

Speaker 14 Right.

Speaker 32 This came from Adam Rosenbaum.

Speaker 46 It's just a lovely slice of Andy Townsend on Talk Sport.

Speaker 17 Nothing special, just some bread and butter Townsendian goodness.

Speaker 66 We were speaking just a bit before we come on here about young players from my, so my era, when I was at Southampton, Shira and the Tissier, Matty and Big Al, both were training with the reserves, as it was then, or even the youth team, and got the...

Speaker 66 and got that one and the curly finger. Over you come.
You're training now with the big boys.

Speaker 2 Curly finger.

Speaker 29 A whistle.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 41 Yeah.

Speaker 28 Matty and Big Al.

Speaker 52 Is Letitier a Matty?

Speaker 6 I'm not adding down as a Matty.

Speaker 23 You know, before or after his head's gone the moment.

Speaker 5 It's just wonderful. The curly finger, the little whistle.

Speaker 23 Everything's great. I love it, Nick.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 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?

Speaker 17 I sort of see it as being summoned from the touchline to come on as a substitute rather than

Speaker 2 no

Speaker 2 Nigel. No.

Speaker 25 manager is not like arcing his neck, looking down the touchline, giving a sub the curly finger, are they?

Speaker 2 No, no, no, no.

Speaker 52 Do you summon a substitute from do you just wave them?

Speaker 51 Is it

Speaker 58 a hand thing, isn't it?

Speaker 25 Yeah, it's a hand wave. It's not the curly finger.

Speaker 2 Come on.

Speaker 2 That's too weird.

Speaker 10 It's weird.

Speaker 23 That's obvious.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 That was unwritten. But come on, Dave.
Now you're going to... When the Ribblesdale season starts, you're going to incorporate the curly finger, surely.
Yeah.

Speaker 25 I am going to dish out a few curly fingers this season, I think.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 41 Oh, God.

Speaker 65 Right, our preoccupation continues with the film Saipan, starring Steve Coogan as Mick McCarthy.

Speaker 27 Nick, it will celebrate its world premiere at the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival next month, screening as part of the centrepiece program, which recognises the best of international cinema.

Speaker 40 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?

Speaker 2 Lovely.

Speaker 58 Class! That's nice.

Speaker 31 We We should go.

Speaker 21 Can we go?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 25 Let's get there. Let's get to the premiere.

Speaker 2 Six hour flights, something like that. Fair enough.
Very reasonable prices on some of those flights, I think.

Speaker 25 I really hope that the facilities are up to standard for Steve Coogan. Yeah.
It'd be a real shame if they weren't.

Speaker 44 I can't remember any of the quotes from the thing to turn this into a joke, but let's assume it's happened.

Speaker 43 Yeah, completely agree.

Speaker 35 Right, finally, and sticking to the travel theme, this came from Chris Lepkowski.

Speaker 52 He says, a question.

Speaker 43 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?

Speaker 37 Or is it just me?

Speaker 17 No, spot on. Exactly what you should do.

Speaker 23 I'd probably only do this 24 hours ahead.

Speaker 31 I would only think the day before, Nick.

Speaker 17 I wouldn't plan any further ahead.

Speaker 65 But yeah, I'm definitely wearing the clothes that are being kept back.

Speaker 23 The gascoin at France 98.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, 100% do that. 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 away on a Friday, you've got

Speaker 2 you got to get that washed, haven't you? So, you know, you're not giving yourself a huge amount of time.

Speaker 35 Dave, I know you enjoyed 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

Speaker 2 completely clean.

Speaker 25 So, you took all the standby players out with you, yeah.

Speaker 2 You never know, you never know what's going to happen.

Speaker 2 I had this conversation with my wife after my trip to Belgium at the weekend, she was astonished that

Speaker 2 I didn't have any spare pants with me, that

Speaker 2 I had taken the exact and worn the exact number of pants.

Speaker 59 It's like a 1.2 situation.

Speaker 44 You want a better than a goal a game situation with your pants when you're going on holiday.

Speaker 10 Definitely.

Speaker 2 I mean, without kind of prying into your personal circumstances, how often do you use the spare pair?

Speaker 2 The kind of, you know, the, or is it more of a kind of, you know, you just know, you know that you're prepared for any eventuality?

Speaker 65 I note your curious tone and I will, I will indulge it.

Speaker 17 I treat holiday days as kind of two days.

Speaker 39 They're like a double header.

Speaker 42 They're like the Liverpool friendly against athletic Bilbao.

Speaker 2 You have the early part of the day, you go out and you go and see things, and what,

Speaker 51 and typically you come back for a rest.

Speaker 16 Everyone comes back for a rest.

Speaker 17 It turns into like a three-hour snooze and you've wasted the day.

Speaker 46 But fundamentally, that's how it works.

Speaker 53 To me, the day starts again.

Speaker 46 New pants, new day, and then that's when the sort of afternoon and evening begin.

Speaker 17 So,

Speaker 10 fair play.

Speaker 25 You can't argue with it, really.

Speaker 59 Fresh pants are a nice feeling.

Speaker 2 They are, but it just seems about necessary.

Speaker 14 Seven extra pairs was complete madness.

Speaker 54 I don't know what happened there, but you know, I kept squeezing them into the suitcase.

Speaker 21 And now, Dave, out of a moment of pure Instagram boredom, I bought one of those vacuum packs for suitcases where it sucks all the air out.

Speaker 41 Bring on the tour.

Speaker 10 I'll pack your clothes if you want.

Speaker 2 And Charlie's.

Speaker 2 I'm a packing cubes guy now. I've got packing cubes.

Speaker 22 Yeah, elite.

Speaker 49 Elite Elite packer.

Speaker 21 Great stuff.

Speaker 22 Thanks to you, Nick Miller.

Speaker 46 Thank you. Thanks to you, Dave Walker.
Thank you.

Speaker 23 Thanks to everyone for listening.

Speaker 49 We'll be back on Tuesday. See you then.

Speaker 9 Looking to transform your business through better HR and payroll? Meet PACOR, a paychecks company, the powerhouse solution that empowers leaders to drive results.

Speaker 9 From recruiting and development to payroll and analytics, Paycor connects you with the people, data, and expertise you need to succeed.

Speaker 9 Their innovative platform helps you make smarter decisions about your most valuable asset, your people. Ready to become a better leader? Visit paycorp.com slash leaders to learn more.

Speaker 9 That's paycor.com/slash leaders.