I Wanna Dance With Peter Drury, grinding out a 5-4 & Haaland's League One future

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Is Gas going on to have a crack? He is, you know. Oh, I think

brilliant!

But jeez! He's round the goal, Keeper! He done it!

Absolutely incredible! He launched himself six feet into the crowd, and Kung Fu kicked a supporter who was

without a shadow of a doubt getting him lip. 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 long!

Peter Drury and Whitney Houston, Richarlison's claims to a niche world record. Can you grind out a 5-4 win? The BBC vs ITV World Cup rivalry kicks off in earnest.

The latest elite level mannerism to trickle down to the grassroots. Under what circumstances could Erling Erling Haaland find himself playing in League One?

Nick Voltamada and the Revelation Threshold? Panto Dan Byrne? How could all 20 Premier League clubs sack a manager in the same season? And some 24 carat Andy Gray co-commentary gold.

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 Charlie Eccleshare.
How you doing? Very well, thank you.

I am still, what, 72 hours later, absorbing the sight and sound of Peter Drury accepting his award for Commentator of the Year at the FSAs on Monday night to the soundtrack of Whitney Houston's I Wanna Dance with Somebody.

Yeah.

I think he might have even been able to hear you from the stage and we were quite away. You say, why are they doing that? What was that?

Why are they playing that? Got nothing to do with anything. I mean, it was...
Wow, that sounds obnoxious. Wow, fair play.

It was

a curious decision. Maybe he requested it specially.
That's what what I'm hoping for. That is what I'm hoping for.
Alongside you is David Walker. How are you feeling? I'm feeling okay.
Okay.

Yeah, I'm all right. Dressed like Brian Clough, and you're well up for it.
That's good to know. Time, Dave, to add to our FSA Awards Despair montage.

Just about recovered from our evening at the Football Supporters Association Awards. Fruitless, fruitless evening.
But that's fine. Good to be there.

And congratulations to Max Rushdon and Barry Glenn Denning and the rest of the Guardian. Yeah, it was good.
It was a good evening, as always.

Well done to the guys from the Guardian Football Weekly for winning yet again. Six out of ten speech from Barry on morale.
Yeah, morale's okay. Yeah.
Yeah. Come to terms with Monday night.

Yeah, Monday night. We were at the Football Supporters Association Awards.

For the fifth year running, we were nominated for podcast of the year, but we didn't win because the winners were the football ramble. And

we go to such a good snapshot.

There was an amazing wow halfway through there for the congrats to Max and Barry.

It was a really good speech by Barry Glendenning this year. So

all credit to everyone.

Just happy to be there again, aren't we, Dave? Let's face it. Yeah, always a good night, to be fair.
We had fun. And yeah, well done to the Guardian Football Weekly team.

We'll see you again and do everything exactly the same next year. Yeah.
Haven't responded to our request to do a quiz, and that's also fine.

Cricket clichés episode three is going to happen after the second test in Brisbane. So get in touch at cricket.football clichés.com.

I was heartened, Dave, in the WhatsApp group for cricket cliches to see Nick Miller, Charlie Reynolds, and Daniel Gallon discussing the nuances between doing a job with the bat and being no mug, which I feel like is a quite a universal sporting concept anyway.

But it's good to know that there's a cricket twist on this. Yes.
Yeah, yeah. They're really getting into it now, aren't they? So I look forward to hearing how that one plays out.

I think, I mean, no mug is better than doing a job, isn't it?

Diversity. Yeah, absolutely.
Because it implies that there's some ability that you haven't considered. Yeah, and a certain level of kind of acumen, I think, and shrewdness.
Yeah.

You know, even if you're not the most natural, you, you know, you kind of have a way of being effective. Yeah, exactly.

And speaking of acumen and shrewdness, the Football Cliche's Christmas quiz live in aid of shelter on the 28th of December. We're going to be live streaming from 8 p.m.

You can get involved, fully interactive, or you can just watch along on YouTube without getting involved. Six pounds to enter, and you can play on your phone or any device, wherever you are.

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to the winner slash winners, depending on how you've managed to formulate your team and other things as well. Just go to football cliches.com slash Xmas.
It's going to be brilliant.

Before we get stuck into the adjudication panel though, Charlie, you noticed something.

Yeah, I'm sure I've brought this up before, but I'm a big fan or sort of, maybe it's an MHC fascination of that fairly ludicrous construct of, if you told me a year ago that X, you you know, then you just say a thing and obviously it has happened, like, why, first of all,

who are these people telling you things? And also, everything they say seems to come true. So I actually would believe if, you know, if someone did come up to me and said something.

But anyway, I really like this variant from Pep, which is just a kind of a proportionate reaction, I think. He says, when Haaland arrived, you would tell me he would score 100 goals in 111 games.

I would say, are you sure? In the Premier League.

So good. It's not, I wouldn't have said you were crazy.
I just would have gently inquired, like, really, what, definitely 100. Okay.
Yeah. It's plausible.

And you do know it's the...

Yeah, no, no, no, it's the premium. Okay, yeah.
100 and 100. Yeah.
Okay.

We've officially got the scale for this now, Davids. Are you sure? All the way up to biting your arms and legs off, and that's it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pep's not going to bite anyone's arms and legs off, is he? Isn't it? That's it for Pep. Just blazing yet another trail.
Right, adjudication panel begins with this.

The big question of the midweek Premier League programme so far comes from Chris Lambert. Charlie, is this Richarlison has grabbed the ball from the net for Spurs' last four goals.

Two versus Newcastle, one versus Fulham, and one versus PSG. Is this a world record? It must be.
It must be.

That's such a great spot. Yeah, I was thinking, like, the obvious way to go is a sort of high-scoring player for a struggling team.
So would, like, Andy Johnson for Palace in that 04-05 season,

it's possible. And he took a lot of pens.
Like, that seems to be where you generally find this kind of thing. I'm going to look it up.
It'd be so easy to fact check out.

All his goals in the Premier League. Yeah, I like watching footballers who look like me as well, so it's going to be a great afternoon.

I don't know. I'd be interested to see if that is true, but there's a different level of sort of desperation and urgency when you're a club like Spurs who are going through a bit of a rocky match.

Whereas Palace, you're kind of expected to struggle a little bit. So perhaps you don't feel the need to be performatively urgent.
Yeah, a lot of... That's a good point, though.
Like, how universal.

I'd still say it's fairly universal, though, isn't it?

If you like, I wonder what proportion actually of, you know, if you do score in a kind of, you know, three to make it 3-1 or 2-1 down, like, does it happen all the time?

And we just don't even, it doesn't even register? Like, I'd sort of expect my player to do it. One game that does come to mind is England's six Sam Marino nil at Wembley in 1993.

David Platt scored four goals, and I'm almost certain that he picked the ball out of the net and really earnestly ran back because it was a goal difference thing. Yeah.

And he did it for at least two of them. So that's on my research list.
So we'll get there, Chris Lambert. That's good, Shadow.

Would they have done that presumably in the 7-1 as well, in the away game? I mean, I know it was like a completely forlorn chase, but presumably they were doing that every goal, weren't they?

Because they needed to score some ludicrous number and hope there was a massive swing in the other game. Yeah, I can't remember who the goal scorers were that night.
Ian Wright got a Ian Wright got a.

I think he might have got four. Right.
Okay. Okay.
We'll look into it, Chris Lambert. On to Tuesday night's action in the Premier League Day, Fulham four, Manchester City five.

But which of the nine goals had the best commentator enunciation? Listener, Seb Svard provides the answer. Here's John Champion for the ninth of the nine.
Harry Wilson, then.

Palmed away. Chukweze! He's done it again.

It's almost mocking.

It's really hard to discuss.

Ooh, Chikweze, is it? Ooh.

I mean, it's a very subtle flourish, Charlie, but I don't think I've heard that very often. No, is it a hint of surprise that the shot got through all the forest of legs, do you think?

It must be a getting caught in between two minds there and sort of ending up with a weird somewhere in the middle. Various points of that first half, Dave.

Bill Leslie's sky commentary was merging with John Champion's sort of world feed commentary in the gantry. You could hear them over the same mic, which was quite the remix, to be honest.

That is a bit weird, yeah. You sort of don't like to think that the two things are ever happening within earshot of each other.
How should this be allowed technologically in 2025?

We know there's going to be multiple commentators there. Don't let them bleed into each other's mics.
Mad. From the BBC, Charlie, at full time, their live report said,

Of course, Manchester City will be disappointed with some of the goals conceded tonight, and many of you will say you can't win a title defending that way.

But ultimately, they have now won back-to-back matches in that fashion. Grinding out wins when not at your best.
Kevin Spectro asks, can you grind out a 5-4 victory?

That is a really good question. But also, and like that, those two paragraphs.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I don't, yeah.
That's the important thing, isn't it?

If you were coming back from, you know, you're 1-0 down and you got it all the way back up to four-all and then you scored the fifth, that could be a, you know, you've sort of ground your way through that, I guess.

But

even then, it's such a thriller, isn't it? It's like, you know, there's so much going on. Like, grinding,

there is a set, you know, it's just a bit of a grind. Like, there is an implication that it's low scoring.
It's tough work. Yeah.
This is too zany, I think. Yeah.

I mean, you've got a four-goal margin at one point. Then essentially, hapless defending brings the other team to within one goal.
I mean, that's not grinding.

And then, I mean, where would even the mini sort of micro-grinding have been? The last five minutes?

Yeah, well, I guess, yeah, the 15 minutes plus stoppage time where, you know, where Fulham were within a goal, I guess they're not. That's digging in, though, isn't it? That's not a problem.

Yeah, yeah. Probably is more digging in.
Yeah. I mean, yeah.
To finish the point on this, Dave, if you grind out a win,

the implication is that half the grinding is getting the goal that you needed, and the the other half is seeing it over the line.

And Manchester City essentially didn't do either of those things in a pure grinding sense. Yeah, yeah.
It's obviously not a grind. It's not a grind.
It's not. Great.

Danny Jameson has provided some incredible information for us, Charlie. We were talking the other day about whether player ratings had ever issued a 10 and a 1 to teammates in the same game.

And Everton's win over Manchester United did provide that with Idrissa Gay getting the one and Kieran and Dewsbury Hall getting the 10. Had it ever happened before, we pondered.

And we suspected that it might have happened in England, Argentina, in 1998. The mirrors player ratings for that day are a lot more compressed than you might imagine.
David Beckham got a five.

Yeah, that's surprising. I'm sure something like the Sun did go with a one.

Five feels quite sort of gentle. Yeah, maybe the Mirror did a little bit.
I mean, maybe they were taking his assist into account, just like who scored.

But yeah, nines that night. Tony Adams, Saul Campbell, and Michael Owen.

Yeah, I mean, they are looking at these there are there are quite a lot of eights I mean it's only only Skulls gets a seven which feels a bit harsh because isn't he involved in the Owen goal doesn't he set it up Beckham set it up oh it's Beckham but doesn't oh Scott oh that's it sorry Skulls is ignored by

by Owen that's I knew he was sort of in in shot for that goal but um yeah it's actually like fair enough because I was envisioning that this ratings was going to be just a kind of jingoistic like the headline you know the 10 heroes once did he boy and that it was all going to be like tub thumping they were all amazing and Becky Let's down.

But actually, the Skulls one is on the most confident show from

the young Manchester United trickster, and he should have scored before half-time

for managed some clever moves and tricks. He's not a trickster.
Yeah, I know. It's interesting.
He was, well, perceived by this writer as a trickster at that point.

Well, maybe, Dave, we should never take too much stock in newspaper play ratings. Maybe they are just phoned in.
Amongst the substitutes, that Dave Rigland, all sevens.

Southgate for Lassau, 71 minutes, did as much as could have been expected. Seven.
David Batty for Darren Anderton, 97 minutes. Instant impact, but sadly missed decisive penalty.
Seven.

Should a missed penalty in a shootout affect your player rate? That's true.

It's not part of the game, as the laws of the game do say. They also gave the referee, Kim Milton Nielsen, a mark out of ten as well.

Missed the Argentinian handball that should have been a penalty. He made some strange decisions.
Five.

Yeah, no direct commentary on the Becks, Red. Yeah.
There we go.

A completely tangential question. Now, Dave, Richard Foster writes in and says, At what age is the most X years of age age? Everton vs.

Newcastle the other night had just 19 years of age, which feels like a really solid years of age, doesn't it? What are your thoughts? I feel like 19, 18 is about right for this.

Yeah, it's definitely skews younger, doesn't it?

I mean, you c

how young can you go? Could you, you know, max down on just 15 years of age, of course? I don't know.

Yeah, I I don't of all the max down and discourse, Charlie, I don't think I've heard fifteen years of age yet, actually. It's just 15.
Maybe the incredulity sort of kicks in when you go under 16. So

16, 17, 18, 19, I think get the years of age. But I think the interesting observation for this, Charlie, is that you've never used it for an incredibly old player.
So 42 years of age. 38 years of age.

Do you think years of age kicks in then? I don't know. You're definitely not going to do it in the middle.
So you're not 25 years of age, of course, now.

But if a player is playing into their 40s, gracing the Premier League stage stage at the grand old age

of 38 years of age. There's too many ages and stages in there.

Very dreary. Do you know what's so weird about this? Was I listened to Ashley Cole on Stick to Football

last week, I think it was. And I noticed he exclusively used years of age for any age.
It was very odd. And it was such like a footballery thing.
So he was talking about every age.

And so it did go young. It was things like, you know, I'd been with with Arsenal since I was eight years of age.

And then it would, but then it would just carry on and be like, you know, and there I was, you know, 23 years of age being offered this new contract. So

it was as if it had been so like football language pilled that it was all all bets are off. Any age was years of age.
It's an incredibly inefficient way of saying how old somebody is.

I think you really need to. It's really weird.
There's no real gravitas to it either.

Well, this is real second half of the midweek adjudication panel fodder already, but no, no, that's just the that's just the luck of the running order draw.

A classic strand of World Cup discourse is kicking in this week, Charlie. The early knockings of BBC versus ITV.
Daily Mail sticking in the boot on the BBC for the stay-at-home World Cup.

Because the BBC are allegedly planning not to send pretty much anybody out there. Presenters, commentators, whatever, probably a couple of reporters, and that's it.

Until the latter stages, isn't it? Until the latter stages, yeah.

So cue a lot of chat about value for money and then some further chat about, you know, do we really even need commentators and presenters to be physically at the tournament just to essentially produce a televisual product for the for back home and I guess in 2025 that's not an that's a fairly pertinent discussion to have technology is pretty advanced you know off-tube commentary is pretty tolerated now especially sort of in the Europa league era it's not a techno it's not a technology thing though really is it but technology makes it more plausible and viable to do it maybe but it's the argument for people working on these tournaments to the reason they would say that they should be there is because it's for the same reason as if you go to a live game,

you're going to notice different things than if you watch it on TV. And they're the people broadcasting the games.

Their job is to tell the story that they can see in front of their eyes and they can feel

and see things exactly. So I think there is value, but you know, obviously the BBC have different financial pressures than perhaps some of the commercial organisations.
And it's such a mad World Cup.

It's not like Germany, where it was kind of simple to just in Berlin and you can kind of get around easily. Like, where's your hub in North America or across? Need a hub, you know,

continent. But what I don't know is, like, obviously, for people who work in the industry and are aware of the things Dave's just described, this is hugely important.

I genuinely don't really have a sense of like what the average football, how much the average football viewer would care or even necessarily know.

I mean, they would know, but would consciously, you know, like if you said the average football, like, oh, you know, do you think that they would have a studio in Brazil or something, or they would do it from home?

Like, I don't know. I mean, I I guess most would assume they're there.
How much that would bother them? I don't know.

And like, I remember talking to someone who runs his own, a friend of mine, runs his own business, and he was kind of like, to Dave's point, he was like, but he was like, why?

And I was telling him I was going some far-flying place for a game. He was like, is that really worth the company's money? Like, how much about, how much are you getting?

Whisper it quite, but I do agree. But do you know what I mean?

Like, you know, sometimes you need people outside of the bubble to slightly question, like, is it worth sending our correspondent to Baku to cover Karabakh, Chelsea?

You know, just as a hypothetical, like you're getting, you're spending a lot of money to get a press conference before and after the game. Quotes are going to be out anyway.

You know, and it's about showing face, it's about the colour and stuff. But if you to actually quantify

that colour and stuff is maybe difficult. I don't know.
I think over time you would notice the difference, I think. And that's, that's always the danger.
It's like.

Yeah, you're just a road, you're chipping away at something. Yeah, before you know it, what, you know, the whole thing can crumble pretty quickly if you just stop going to stuff.

So I sort of, I get the fears and I get the anxieties from people within the industry. I mean, look at the cricket.

I mean, they talked about this a lot on cricket clichés in the last episode, but TNT have come under fire for the way they've attempted to cover the ashes so far with a mixture of people out there, some people doing it back here as a model.

Exactly.

You don't want the coverage itself to become a story, do you? You want to do it as best as you can so that people wouldn't notice anything like that.

But on the topic of whether people care or not, Charlie, I mean, that's a quite a fluid concept when it comes to televised football.

Lots of people claim to care about things that they don't really care about, and I think one of them is: does the

studio have a kind of local backdrop behind it to demonstrate that they're there? It's one of the traditions of World Cup broadcasting, and we are starting to move away from it.

And I do think people will pretend to care about that.

But the Beyond Parody Daily Mail columnist Jeff Powell has jumped on this and he says the BBC's Work From Home World Cup is a new low in the posturing arrogance of their woke fifth column.

John Watson and Brian Moore will be turning in their graves. John Watson and Brian Moore used to duel for millions of viewers on the greatest of all matches.

Mercifully, Father Time caught up with both before Auntie gathered up her skirts and hid behind them.

Wow.

That got better as it went on.

Mercifully, Father Time caught up with both of them.

Thank God they're dead. I want to dig into this in the most clichésy way possible, Dave.
It's not John Watson and Brian Moore's job to turn in their graves over this.

They would turn in their graves over whether commentators are behaving themselves and conducting themselves in the right way. Not about how they're treated and where they're deployed.

That's not their job. Don't turn in your graves.
You mean that deceased BBC executives would be turning in their graves? Exactly. Or former heads of sport and commissioners.
Lord Reith.

Or people who held the purse strings.

You can't do a game off tube.

no,

okay, Jalski.

I'm applauded.

Oh dear. Well, there we go.
This one will run and run. But this episode is brought to you in association with NordVPN.
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This came via George, who was watching a very tedious first half between MacArthur and Perth Glory in the A-League the other day, and heard the half-time whistle greeted with just a very Australian reaction.

Taking this long is daring for the halftime whistle to be blown.

A long throw is the answer in the end. Sawyer able to outmaneuver his opponent, but illegally so.
and that will take us to half-time.

We need to have more of this. No more booing, just people bellowing boring at half-time.

Incredibly Australian delivery of it as well.

So there we are. Thanks, George, for that one.
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That is wonderful!

Welcome back to Football Clichés. A reminder that Dreamland episode 12 is out now, Premier League years.
A great reaction to it, Charlie, but it's opened up a strand of discourse on the Reddit.

Jagged Corpse 43 says, relating to the recent Dreamland episode, what is the transfer you most associate with Premier League years? Interesting question. What angle would you go for with this?

Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, I would go a mid-season one because then I feel they can really go to town on it.

Whereas otherwise it gets lost a little bit in the Liverpool with the big spenders in the summer. You want it to be like a specific thing.

And I mentioned on the episode that 94-95 was my... favourite episode.
There's a great bit in that when Newcastle sell Andy Cole to Manchester United and Kevin Keegan.

I don't know exactly what it's it seems like a sort of impromptu Q ⁇ A with fans to sort of... On the steps of St.
James's. Yeah, on the steps of St.
James's, yeah, because they're all out there.

Yeah, that's it. They're out there protesting.

And he goes and sort of justifies the decisions and explains it.

I mean, you know, when you talk now about, you know, oh, these managers and executives in their ivory tower, they never talk, we never hear from them.

And there he is, just, you know, explaining it to the fans. But yeah,

that for me is one that sticks in my mind. Yeah, I do like mid-season transfers for this, Dave.

Your Christophe Dugarey's to Birmingham, your Paul Kitsons to West Ham players who have come in with the express remit of reversing some fortunes especially in a relegation battle and you know proceeding to do so so that provides probably league years with at least two ins as well for that story so yeah transfers need some hooks I think kits now hartson as well so it's almost like a bit of a double thing which which I think adds adds something I do like the earlier era the pre-transfer window years where, like you say, you know, you can have a player signed in March or something or in February, and that seems like a real weird curiosity now.

We're so used to the rhythm of transfers. I do quite like the early season ones, and there's a lot of shots in Premier League years of you don't tend to get now.

Now, you now, the managers and players tend to be like in the boardroom, arm round him, signing the contract, or whatever.

Whereas before, it used to be like stood outside the training ground in the car park or in the stands holding the shirts

with the manager with the arm round them. There were quite a lot of those that I noticed when watching them last week.

Yeah, I quite like the early season ones though, Charlie, like you just said, they'll do a little roundup at the start with Liverpool.

What year was it when Liverpool signed like Bruno Shiroux and Ballads and the Billion players? Yeah, it's a post-World Cup with Duf and Salif Jiao and stuff like that. Yeah, new year.

Quite like a summer of new arrivals.

Oh yeah, big statement signings as well. Your Verones, your Rio Ferdinands, things like that.
Or Soul Campbell to Arsenal, of course, which I think would, you know, have the attached baggage as well.

One of the interesting things,

we didn't touch on this in the episode, but you go back and you watch from the early 90s all the way well into mid-naughties, I guess, is this the amount of press conferences that used to happen in the press conference.

I was going to say that.

Because I think I noted that while watching something, like you get, yeah, you get like new signings of doing them and things like that. Because there's no other way

to speak to anyone, is there? You can't do a social media announcement video in 1994. You know, you have to, if you want news to get out there, you don't have a website.

You've just got to, you've got to do a press conference.

Whether it's a new signing, whether it's a manager resigning, whatever it is, whether it's bad, good, or somewhere in between, like you have to do a press conference.

Maybe that does explain the slow death of Premier League years, or it's all its sort of recent collapse as a concept.

Because you can't just put, you know, Instagram montages on Premier League years and get away with it. That's a good point.

Anyway, if that tickles your taste, buds, go to dreamland.football cliches.com for $5.99 a month.

You get ad-free listening of all of our episodes, two episodes a month of Dreamland, and other bits and bobs as well. Right, adjudication panel resumes with this from Aussie O'Sullivan.

He says, I was playing five aside tonight. We won a penalty for them touching it in the box.
It had been a pretty spicy game, few arguments. I'm the pen taker.

I bend down to tie my laces and I look up and come to the spot and my mate had the ball pretending to be the taker and handed it to me trying to protect me. He got roundly ridiculed in the pub.

I could so see this catching off across. That's amazing.

I would be so annoyed if I was the penalty taker because then you look like you're complicit in it and everyone's just going to be absolutely baying for you and desperate for you to miss it and be the prick who was so self-important who tried to do like the professional bit of little switcheroo thing.

That is a very good shout, Dave. This has wider ripples, this act, doesn't it? Yeah, exactly.

You know, it's not exactly a long walk, is it, either, to take the penalty in five-aside, the one-step penalty.

Well, that's that true. Also, the mechanics of doing it in an 11-aside elite game, Charlie, is to is to, you know, safety in numbers.

The other team can't work out who's taking the penalty, and it will take them too long to figure it all out and get in their brain.

On the other hand, there's only four outfield players, really, that it's likely to be. You could just ridicule them all and it'll be all their heads.
Do a man-for-man situation.

You'd get it done pretty efficiently. Split it evenly.
It's going to be you, isn't it? It's going to be you. You're rubbish, mate.
Oh, dear.

I'm coming out of five-aside retirement, by the way. On the back of this.
pretty much, actually. Two years since I moved out of London, where I was surrounded by Power League and goals.

I am no longer. So I had to resort to an appeal on the local Facebook group, the indignity of it all.
And went on Gumtree. Got yourself on the game.
Yeah, basically.

So, yeah, so there's a nearby Monday nighter, which I can't make very often. I'm interested to know where you end up playing because

I think I might know one of the refs in your area.

Any hot refs in my area?

Honestly, I was chatting to him bait of mine the other day. I hadn't seen him in a little while.
He's a referee, like does 11s on Sundays and does a bit of five-aside refereeing in the week.

And he, I don't know, I don't know how he got onto it, but we

worked out that he refs in your local area. And I said, oh, my mate Adam lives near there.
And he goes, yeah, I'll ref around there. So wow.
Hope I get him. Hope I get him.

It'd be amazing to get the feedback. I mean, a twist of fate, Charlie, the venue, it turns out, is where I used to train with the Swindon Town Centre of Excellence.
Back to my roots. Wow.

The Mad Project. Proper heritage.

Yeah, can't wait. I'll let you know how that goes.
Next up, Imperfect Dark has a nice little midweek hypothetical for us.

He says, what series of events would need to happen for Erling Haaland to end up at a team like Doncaster? You can add injuries and failed career moves.

What's the earliest season he could theoretically end up there? Now,

my first port of call. in this scenario, Dave, isn't injuries and lack of form, because I feel like that would be a really gradual descent.

Even if he completely plummeted in form, I still think it would take five or six years before he even remotely became a Doncaster prospect, depending on how their fortunes go.

So I think, I don't want to be too morbid about this, I feel like he'd have to do something terrible off the field. Yeah.
And his career would just have to essentially be cancelled. And

they'd be sort of controversially taking him on. So

you can't do it. He just wants it.
He wants another chance. And we like giving players second chances.

That is definitely a potential scenario. Yeah, they're the only club that will touch him, sort of thing.
But

perhaps you could...

Perhaps he could end up there if Doncaster, for whatever reason, were taken over by an oil-rich state and they themselves ended up zooming up the pyramid and like right at the end of his career, Haaland signs a two-year deal with them for loads of money, right?

When he's 37 years of age. Yes.
But do we not assume, though, that they have to be... Because Doncaster, what, League One?

Do we not have to assume that we're talking about, you know, would he be at a League One team? Yeah, Yeah, I think it's cheating a bit to allow Don Caster to fly up the divisions artificially.

But I did quite like the Mountain to Mohammed situation, but yeah, essentially,

how early could Haaland find himself in League One and why? Well, yeah, his contract expires in 2034. That's also

and he's on absurd money. So there'd be very little reason, very little incentive for him

to go and then buy for them.

Unless,

as you say, something went horribly wrong. Because, yeah, even if, even if he did have horrible injuries,

I guess, you know, could they agree?

I guess if he had really bad injuries, they might agree to just pay him out, pay the rest of his contract and say, like, this isn't really worth you sort of being around here.

And he might be a bit miserable. And if he got the payoff, and then he was a free agent.
So let's say. If he did, if he

does his ACL tomorrow, or indeed today.

He's just stay, but fine.

Yeah, but

often the most dangerous.

So next season, so he comes back next season, but then it's clear he's not right. And he barely breaks down in the first game, like in our groups.

Yeah, exactly. I still think he'd still then have all of the next season to sort of prove himself to City.
He's earned that much.

So we're talking about two and a half years from now, there would have to then be a bit of a reckoning and a conversation of is this what's going on here?

But I still think they would then kind of be loaning him. So I think it would a good

three and a half years from now. We've got the answer, right? His injuries were so bad, they mutually agreed to let him go and Doncaster take a chance on him.

You do get that scenario happening sometimes with, yeah, I don't know, like Jack Wilshire playing for that team in Denmark.

A player that knows the game's up, but just hasn't been able to come to terms with it themselves yet. And somebody will take them on reputation and just in case they might still have it.

And I I mean, Doncaster's not a bad shout for Haaland, but maybe, you know, leads born of Kaleville. I was going to say, like, closer to his childhood home.
That's the pool. Yeah.

That's the pool, isn't it?

Who were the

team that Wilshire played for, by the way, Dave? Not Odense, as you guessed in the Career We Go quiz on Friday last week. Why did that keep coming up in the quiz? It was very annoying.

It wasn't Odense indeed. What would then happen as well was...

Yeah, I was going to say, our house

comes to mind.

What would then happen is that Doncaster would do a welcome home and we would get into that like oh is that home not sure that's not sure there's any home for earlier island yeah three cheese in five years still go you've really gone into this scenario haven't you yeah the wider ripples of this right let's move on i want to revisit a threshold we've spoken about recently the revelation threshold here's jamie rednapp on nick voltamada And obviously with Voltamada being there as well, the two German boys getting on well together, they've settled really well because he's been a revelation as well.

The crowd love him. You know, he's got that lovely language style.
very skillful, easy on the eye. Has he been a revelation, Charlie, Nick Voltamada at Newcastle?

I mean, without getting shaking his head.

Yeah, without getting all literally Dave about it, I mean, like, a revelation, I think in a pure sense for a footballer, it's kind of, you know, something's been revealed.

And so it should be, I think, like, the purest version of a revelation is, you know, and he's, you know, ex-player in midfield's been a revelation because we had no idea that this guy could play midfield.

Like,

we've known this player for years and he's suddenly revealing this side himself.

Yeah, Joe, yeah yeah joe linton was a revelation at midfield for a period you know this like non-goal scoring striker suddenly becomes like a really good hard man centre mid is a great revelation

voltenada i mean like yes he's revealed his existence to us because none of us had really heard of him before but beyond that

not sure i really like this fundamentalist approach to this dave um i i mean you you could argue he's been a revelation in terms of his impact you know he's become something of a cult figure at newcastle with his his personality and his style but in in pure footballing terms, is seven goals in 17 games, five in 10 in the Premier League Revelation territory.

I don't say he's miles off,

but I don't think he's quite there. I think he's got a couple of assists as well.
But yeah. Oh, fair enough then.

I'm getting this information purely from FPL as well, so I don't know if they're proper assists or choke ones, to be honest. But yeah,

it doesn't feel like he's in Revelation territory for me. Yeah, he's not completely torn it up, has he? He's done well, but it doesn't feel like he's absolutely set the Premier League alight.

Maybe he needs a statement game, a statement goal.

Has he had a yeah, I mean, sort of, you know, like a winner in a big, big game, maybe, you know, sort of match-defining performance, and that might be revelation.

But even then, he'd become more known about Charlie, so it kind of actually works against it. You're right.
Um, yeah, good, good from you. Um, plenty of people sent this one in it.

Uh, next, his and this may well complete his 12 months or so. Blythe's very own Dan Byrne is going to be the voice of the genie in Aladdin at the Phoenix Theatre in Blythe this Christmas.

In italics, it makes it very clear in the advert, Dave, that please be aware Dan Byrne does not appear live in the show.

Well, he could very well be a revelation in this part.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Showing a side of him we didn't know he had another string to his bow. I mean, there will still be so many disappointed punters who don't read that disclaimer and are expecting Dan Byrne.

And I include parents as well as children in in that.

Crying. The director of the pantomime has to go out on the steps outside.

Don't worry, we've got Keith Gillespie coming on in a minute.

Oh, dude.

The Danburn Troy Parrot. What a period X they're having

sort of seesaw swings again because Troy Parrot missed that Panenka for RZ the other day.

So, yeah, roller coaster. And roller coaster and a seesaw.

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Oh, look at that!

That is wonderful.

Right, Ben Winfield writes in next, Dave, and has directed us towards the Twitter bio of Lingby Bold Club in Denmark.

And their bio reads, Europa League qualifying two winners, 3-1 on aggregate in 2017 against Sloven Bratislava, who defeated Barcelona in the 1969 1969 European Cup Winners' Cup final by a score of 3-2.

What is going on? What is that, Maya?

Presumably ironic. I really hope so.
There's probably some, you know, sort of wry Scandinavian humour going in here, but that's insane. Are they trying to claim? Is this their claim to the throne?

Yeah.

We're the real European Cup winners. Yeah, it's like, yeah,

the lineage. Yeah, yeah, I guess so.
Man,

I'm not going to go back through all the European Cup winners.

If they are being right, there must be someone they're taking the piss out of. Like, do other clubs.

Must be.

There must be some extreme version of this that they're parodying. They're a second-tier club in Denmark, Dave, which suggests there's probably more playfulness that goes along.

This is probably the equivalent of, like, Carlyle saying, well, we'll sign you, Messi.

Something like that, yeah. You wouldn't get Bronby doing this, would you? No, exactly.
Exactly. So maybe it's good stuff from Lingby.
This hypothetical scenario or variants of will run and run.

Liam Marshall asks Charlie, I just had a thought, Reed, the season where no manager gets sacked. In an alternate viewpoint, what would it take for every manager to get sacked in the same season?

Wow, again, I don't know what the record is for managerial sackings.

I don't know what the record is for the Premier League clubs, all Premier League clubs, or most Premier League clubs sacking the managers. It's probably, what, eight or nine in a season, isn't it?

If you don't include sackings. Eight or nine clubs changing managers.
So we've got at least halfway there before.

Yeah, I think you'd, I mean, sort of broadly, you'd need the teams that, the shock teams that have really good seasons would all just have to start horrifically,

like so badly, that there were a few sort of panic sackings, and then their replacements came in and absolutely, you know, turned things around. Yeah, yeah.

And or again, I'm thinking, like, there might have to be some off-field scandals thrown in, I'm afraid.

You know, some managers who are doing a brilliant job, but get involved in something and the club's hands are tied. Yeah, let's get a contractual minefield, that one.

But rather than be too comprehensive about every club in this one, Dave,

what's the trickiest scenario for this? Because it's not unprecedented for a league title-winning manager to get sacked at the end of the season.

You know, something he might just sort of be, things might have gone on behind the scenes, and it was just generally agreed for all parties that it was time to go.

Now, whether you class that as a sacking and before the end of the actual season is one thing, but that's plausible. That could happen.
Yeah, like

you could have somebody, I don't know, like, let's say Roberto DiMatteo or Avram Grant had won the Premier League. Obviously, you know, DiMatteo

won the Champions League. Like,

somebody who sort of ended up there on coincidental reasons in the first place, kind of, and did well, but it's like, we're going to take this opportunity to just cut our ties now. That could happen.

In fact, it could be even more mundane than that, Charlie.

It could be that they had someone lined up in January and said, right, you're taking over in the summer, and this guy's a dead man walking no matter what he does.

So if they go on to win the title, the deal's still done. And that's still technically a sacking if you're replaced.

So that could work. Well, yeah, I was going to say, would that count? I think it does.
You're forcibly removed and someone else comes in. It's a sacking, surely.
But even like, it's,

you know, we're...

There would have been a world where Chelsea might have sacked them out. Like, like Dave said, I mean, Avram Grant was within a few points of winning the league, wasn't he? So

there was a time when clubs were more trigger-happy, even at, you know. right at the top end.

And you know, you just sack your manager after six or seven games because he's been there a while, he's not been great. You bring someone else in and you win the league with them.
Yeah, but

it's possible. There's going to be a mutual consenty soft middle to this Premier League table that will scupper our plans here, Dave.
I've sense.

Yeah, and do resignations count, like you said, Charlie, like you know, Klopp leaving or whatever when he announced it. Like, you need, because where it will fall down will be that.

You could come up with a plausible reason for even as many as 17 or 18 clubs to be dissatisfied with their situation and to sack their managers.

The two or three who have, you know, who have your peps and now Arteta or whatever, long-standing figures, they really need to be able to do it. That's where the officer stamp right comes in.

You'll play that card. Charlie, I mean, you know, implausible as it already is, I feel like this could never happen now.
We've passed the golden era for this to have been possible.

There's not enough mad owners. There's not enough sort of knee-jet reactions.
We're in the project era now.

Yeah, I do think there was a period where clubs, like when, you know, Chelsea, it felt they were almost going down that kind of Italian model of changing their manager every one or two years.

And I don't feel there are as many clubs doing that anymore.

Next up, Reckitt on Reddit asks, given the sort of sprawling number of Premier League games being broadcast on Sky Sports at the moment, Dave, that they're having to move some games onto sort of Sky Sports cricket, etc.

He asks, what's the correct ranking of Sky Sports channels? Is it a bigger fixture if you're on cricket, F1 or tennis?

I mean, there must be a hierarchy deep in Sky where they decide where these things go. Some fascinating theories in the replies.
Nick Gazam says, I think cricket and F1 are equal.

At the end of the day, you're never going to displace a race or a test match. However, the day we bring back Sky Sports 1, 2, 3, and extra, that's what we want.
Yeah.

I mean, the number channels were great.

I think F1 F1 feels like the most fully formed channel of all the others because this is it's seems to be on more, they make a big deal out of it, whereas cricket is a bit sporadic.

Sometimes they have the rights, sometimes they don't.

Tennis obviously comes around sort of, you know, certain times a year, depending on what rights they have and all that, could be on other channels.

So, F1 seems to be to have the most prestige out of the rest of those channels. F1's really big for Sky.

I really would put that at the top. Angkor Bosch has some historical context for us, Charlie.
F1 was the first breakaway channel, so that was followed by cricket and then by tennis.

No one actually likes tennis in the UK, they just like to pretend they do with strawberries and cream for two weeks a year.

He's rattled. Look at him.

That's okay because they love it in America, and that's fine, actually. Yeah, it turns out.
Exactly. Most red personal on the athletic.
What about like Sky Sports Darts and Sky Sports Golf and stuff?

Oh yeah, golf's in with a shallow. Golf is like Formula One in terms of its relentless schedule and sort of, you know, potentially sort of peripheral content as well.
So

you've also got Sky Sports. I don't know if they still have this actually.
They might have rebranded it, but they had like Sky Sports Mix, which was like the free version where they put stuff on.

You could sort of have a little bit of a free sample kind of thing. Sky Sports Action, is that a thing? I think it was.
I don't know if it still is. But there's also a weird thing.

Like yesterday, I can't remember which game, whether it was during the Spurs game or the City game, where the commentator has to talk about

what channel the games are on. And yeah, it's like, do I make a joke of this? Do I just play it straight? You know, we're all thinking.

It feels quite tinpot, though. Like, it's not.
Yeah, exactly. It does a bit.

For like, for such like a, as you say, like, for back in the day, the one, two, three, extra and all of that stuff, to be saying, like, yeah, and we'll have Bournemouth against Burnley on Sky Sports Golf.

It just is a bit like, what are we doing? It's almost like launching a cricket podcast and housing it on the same feed as the cricket one. Ah,

so we can laugh at ourselves, and that's fine. Right,

that takes care of all our topical matters for the midweek adjudication panel. But we have a bonus: midweek Keys and Grey Corner.

Well, it's actually an Andy Gray corner because we tend to neglect the big man quite a lot. This came from Rob Saunders.
I genuinely don't know if we've had this before.

It did ring a bell, but it is magical.

He says, Here is the ball, David Ginnillar and Chris Armstrong all saying something in this golden piece of Andy Gray commentary from Spurs 3, Manchester United 1 in the League Cup, December 1998.

Ginnela again. Tempting Greening into the tackle.
One foot in. Great ball in.
Oh, it's a magnificent goal again for Armstrong. Ginela, the provider Supreme.
This is what I meant. Get past the post.

Don't stand there, let the keeper come out. Get in front of the goalkeeper.
Attack the post.

And all you need is a touch. The ball is sheer quality.
It's saying, go on, put me in. Chinala says, I've done my bit.
Who wants a goal? Armstrong says, I do.

What a hat-trick. It's so, so good.

Perfect hat-trick. That is amazing.

Which is your favourite of the three, Charlie? You'd say, I feel like the ball does less talking in Andrew Gray's world.

So that's like the less, you know, like for players that would rarely score a perfect hat-trick, and you're like, yeah, because he's not going to get a header, is he?

Yeah, pointing his head when he scores it. Yeah, exactly.
For Gray to get the ball talking as well. I mean, that's just just superb.
Armstrong says I do.

It's brilliant. It's brilliant.
I've done my bit.

I've done my bit.

Go on. Oh, it's a great conversation.
A great interaction between three protagonists in one goal. Brilliant stuff from Andy Gray.
Can't believe we've never featured that before.

Thanks to you, Charlie Eccleshare. Thank you.
Thanks to you, David Walker. Thank you.
Thanks to everyone for listening. We'll be back on Tuesday.
See you then.

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