You're listening to the Footglish Podcast.
Love football, learn English.
Is Gerrit Southgate a great manager or is he the main reason England lost the final of Euro 2024 against Spain?
Did England play good football in the tournament?
Did weather play any part in this?
And what does the expression football is a funny old game mean?
Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Footglish Podcast.
Hopefully your favourite English learning podcast about football.
And I'm recording one day after the Euro 2024 final.
And I'm talking to Luke Thompson again.
Luke Thompson from Luke's English Podcast.
And I have to start by my commiserations, Luke.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, thank you for that.
Yeah, obviously I'm disappointed.
I mean, I'm kind of used to it as well.
And in fact, during the competition, I just expected England to drop out sort of at any time really.
So it was almost sort of like, wait a minute, we're in the final.
Not even sure we fully deserve that.
I don't feel like we played that well really to get through.
If we'd had a blazing competition and we'd been brilliant and, you know, we'd all been happy with the football that England had been playing.
And then we got to the final and then been denied, you know, the trophy at the end.
Then I think it would have been a different feeling.
But as it was, I already felt a slight sense of, I don't know if we fully deserve this.
Although having said that, obviously I was on the edge of my seat and, you know, so delighted when we scored the equaliser.
And I thought, could we really?
I was almost sort of hoping for penalties for some reason.
I don't know why, just because we were so good in our penalties.
We are so good, yeah. Now you're good.
Maybe we've lifted the curse.
But no, of course, no.
No, it wasn't to be again.
And Spain were definitely the better team.
They, you know, showed themselves as being definitely the best team in the competition.
So they had every right to win it.
And I think that the best team won.
That's fair. I think you were punching above your weight a little bit, let's be honest.
Well, it's a funny thing because it's hard to tell if we were punching above our weight or not, because in a way we were, like everyone said at the beginning,
we talked together at the beginning of the tournament and, you know, we both said that England, although everyone's talking about England being the favourites, I'm not sure, or one of the favourites,
but England were described as being one of the favourites.
And maybe on paper you look at the team and you look at all the players and, you know, people have been saying things like, oh, you know, we've got the best player in Spain in Jude Bellingham, the best player in Germany in Harry Kane,
some of the best players in the Premiership, you know, a lot of this big talk about the squad and the team and the individual players and stuff.
But, you know, it's a team game, isn't it, at the end of the day?
Yeah. But what I meant was that, like you said, you were one of the favourites of the tournament before Euro.
I was really putting you in the mix.
But then I saw your matches in the group.
And from then on, I thought you had been punching above your weight. That's my assessment.
I thought you were lucky with the draw. And I think you should also be very proud.
I hope you are, Luke. I hope it's a mix of disappointment and pride because reaching two back to back finals, it's no mean feat.
Yeah. You can't take that away from them.
And I suppose the press today in the UK are probably sticking a knife in, especially for Gareth Southgate, right?
They've probably got the knives out for him.
But, you know, still, he took England to the final of the Euros twice, the semi-final.
Was it the semi-final? One semi-final of the World Cup and a quarter final of the World Cup.
Yeah, and a quarter final of the World Cup. You can't take that away from him or the team.
Historically, if you take away that obviously that victory when you won on your home soil, which was like 50 years ago.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If you forget that, there has been no better manager than him.
Yeah.
Like consistently getting into the later stages of these difficult tournaments.
And it's almost as if every decade now we have more and more teams.
So it's getting harder and harder to get there. Right?
Yeah. And I feel like the standard across the board is very high.
You know, there isn't a huge difference between the absolute top team and one of the smaller teams in the tournament that, you know, that got through to the Euros, for example.
Even the smaller teams, the standard is actually excellent.
A lot of the players in those smaller teams are playing at the highest level as well, you know, in Europe or elsewhere, you know.
And so, yeah, with England, it's been an odd one because although, yeah, as you say, we've performed better than ever, really.
And Southgate has, yeah, taken us to levels that we haven't been able to achieve for decades.
We still feel this weird sense that it's just not good enough and it's disappointing and everyone's going to be criticising Southgate.
I think the part of the reason for that is this year in particular, I think in other competitions we've been a bit more, let's say, impressive and there'd be more goals and it's been like, you know, exciting.
But this tournament, and I feel like the team was perhaps, it was a better make-up of players, as we said.
And yet the way we've played has been so, what's the word for it?
Underwhelming, unimpressive, lacklustre, you know, all these words.
And so, yeah, it's weird that we've, although we've played so boringly and so in such an uninspired way, we've managed to get through.
So I don't know, really, I don't know whether I'm impressed by the team or underwhelmed.
And as you said, like, we were definitely very lucky with the draw.
And in fact, that's kind of a Southgate thing, you know, Southgate thing is to be pretty lucky with a draw in the big tournaments.
I mean, it happened in the World Cup, didn't it, as well, when we got to the semi-final and arguably in the last Euros.
So we managed to like get, this is Spain with the first sort of major challenge that we faced.
The Netherlands shouldn't take anything away from them, but then they're not kind of at the same calibre as a France, a Germany, a Spain.
You know, one of these major teams.
So, yeah, we kind of slipped through maybe kind of getting away with it, not scoring many goals and not looking that dangerous.
I mean, how many shots on target did we get throughout the entire tournament?
You can count them on one hand even.
Yeah, not that many.
But then on the other hand, I heard someone talk about the fact that actually these days you have more possession than in the past.
The way England play now is not what it used to be.
Now you're actually trying to play football under Southgate.
It's the trend, it's the sort of like European worldwide trend anyway.
But still, still, you know, you're adopting, adapting.
And I just, for me, this is a weird one, Luke.
This is a weird one because I feel like, as you said, you have fantastic players playing in fantastic clubs, arguably the best league in the world.
And I think it's part of the problem because I think the expectations as a result of that are so bloody high.
I think you're almost like victims of your own expectations.
And it's the media.
It's the fact that in England, football is everything, right?
So in any country where football means so much, like you could look at Brazil, Spain, Italy.
In these countries, it's like this is the biggest sort of value in the society, almost.
The expectations are going to be high.
Then you have these world class players, right?
You always have this label world class player, Bellingham, Saka.
All these players get these labels and then the fans and the social media as well.
It almost feels like for you to succeed in this kind of environment is extremely, extremely hard, even harder than for some other teams.
I don't know. It's at least how I feel about it.
Yeah. Yeah. There's always a kind of weird imbalance between expectation and reality, which always is a recipe for disaster, isn't it?
In any situation where you expect one thing, but in reality, it's quite different.
Yeah, somehow we always expect England to be great.
Normally, the feeling is at the beginning of a tournament is the feeling of like, you know what?
Don't tell anyone, but I think England might have a chance.
That's normally the way it feels.
But this time it was like, no, solid favourites.
I think we're going to win it this time.
So I think everyone felt a bit more confident about our chances.
So I don't know. What do you reckon? What is it that was the problem?
Because, as I said, everyone's going to be criticising Southgate and I think ultimately it's down to him.
No. His tactics is something to do with the strategy that he's employed.
He's too defensive. He's too cautious.
He's trying to play this game, as you said, this modern game of like keeping possession, moving the ball around.
But he's too defensively minded.
And I noticed that we were holding possession, but just holding it, not even really.
I mean, there were moments like the thing about this tournament was that there were moments for us.
The question is, Luke, sorry.
The question is, is this actually what Southgate tells his players?
Because I'm not so sure. Because, you know, like you have what it takes.
You have the players who are capable of holding the ball and doing one on ones and getting past players.
And the problem for me personally was the fact that some of your key players were out of form.
I would mention Harry Kane. I would also say Foden.
And also, for some reason, also Declan Rice was below his normal self, below his average performance.
And then that's all it takes ultimately.
Yeah, maybe they're all exhausted after a tough season.
I mean, Harry Kane just started in Germany.
So there'll be, first of all, a lot of work that he's been doing on the pitch.
But then off the pitch as well, you can imagine that he's been having to adapt.
He had to eat the bratwurst.
There was like a marketing campaign of the Bayern Munich team.
I saw him eating bratwurst or something like that, right?
Yeah, so who knows? You know, you don't know what it's like.
When you move to another place, especially if you haven't lived abroad the first year,
you can feel kind of out of your comfort zone.
But then, you know, he had a decent season in Germany, didn't he, this year?
He has his usual season, Luke.
He always wins an individual trophy every single time, the top goalscorer.
But his team absolutely fails.
Basically, he's the unluckiest player of the entire history of football.
You don't know a player of this quality that has got so many goals.
He is the top scorer of all time of the England team, right?
Yeah, yeah, that's something.
By a country mile.
He is a captain.
He is internationally recognised.
He is good at penalties.
He's got so many qualities to him.
And yet the teams he plays for, I don't know what it is, but it's some sort of curse.
There's some sort of curse.
There must have been a witch that cast a spell and put him under this curse.
And now you are waiting for the curse to be lifted.
Otherwise, you will never win anything if your teammate is Harry Kane, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, you know, if we actually look at the performances,
I know we're going to try and keep this brief,
but if we look at the performances of England during the tournament,
I mean, everyone was criticising Kane for basically not doing anything,
not enough movement.
And as I was saying before, I never really saw that much creativity.
We get the ball, a lot of lateral passes around the halfway line.
And they're like, we've got the ball.
Now what? Give it to you.
All right, give it to you then.
I think that there wasn't really a lot of, there was something missing in that,
do they call it the holding position?
That kind of central attacking midfield or the midfield position
where you need someone to be opening up the game and controlling things,
that Zinedine Zidane kind of role.
That was a Bellingham job, right?
That was kind of his...
Yeah, kind of.
Foden as well, because it's not what Declan Reyes is good at.
He's more of a box-to-box player and he drives.
He's more of a making drives with the ball.
Like long ball.
No, no, what I mean is like he runs.
He takes the ball, he runs with the ball.
It's like a drive, right?
But not necessarily like making these incisive passes,
like through balls we call them.
It's not his game.
I really think some of your players were a little bit tired.
It felt like that.
It's just being too much for them.
Season is long, more and more games.
But also maybe there's something in the head,
some kind of psychological mental issue, it looks like it a little bit.
Is it, Luke, what do you think?
Is it possible that, because I saw after the final that this manager,
Garry Salkid, I can imagine players love him because he's always
like sort of hugging the players.
You can see there's a deep connection there, right?
Could that be the problem that he's too nice basically?
Yeah, maybe.
Yeah, quite possibly.
I mean, I was just thinking, yes, yeah, maybe.
Everyone feels a bit too protective and it's kind of a little cautious
and you want someone who's a bit more sort of strident,
a bit more of a kind of a leader in the sense that,
I mean, if you look at some of our previously successful managers,
so there was Terry Venables in the 90s when we got to the semifinals
of the Euros and probably should have won it.
And Bobby Robson in the early 90s who helped us get to the quarterfinals
of the World Cup in 86 and the semifinal in 1990.
And both of these guys were charismatic figures, like charismatic leaders.
Personalities, big personalities.
Now, Southgate isn't really that kind of person.
He's more the sort of intense, thoughtful, quite introverted almost.
I would say though that every player needs something different, right?
So there are players who need to be shouted at,
then there are players who need like a nice person to,
like a psychologist kind of manager.
What's the word for it? The man manager.
The man manager, right.
Which is a funny expression, man manager,
because you think well isn't that word man already in the word manager?
But yeah, it means individual coaching,
sort of individual coaching where you kind of approach each player individually
and work with them psychologically.
But then again, here we are again criticising the manager.
Yet he's the most successful manager of all time.
So this is like a cognitive dissonance or something.
On the one hand, right, what did he do wrong?
Why didn't you win?
Could it just be that the Spanish are just so much better
and they have more quality and they just, I don't know.
But again, like I said earlier, if we'd smashed every other game,
like if we'd beaten these smaller teams in the group stages,
but we didn't.
We didn't show ourselves as being like Spain did,
which was they just dominated every game they played.
They just showed what they could do all the time, scored a lot of goals,
scored 15 goals.
We were kind of like, just never really looked like scoring that much,
even against teams that we should be completely taking to pieces.
So now I don't think it's just that Spain were the better team.
I think that, I mean, England played well to some extent.
We didn't concede many goals.
Do you mean the final or overall?
Overall, overall.
I think that despite the fact they scored two goals against us,
I think that we were pretty solid defensively.
I mean, considering how strong Spain are,
I think we held them off quite well for a lot of the game and other games as well.
But very strong defensively, it must have been very hard to play against us,
to get possession and score goals against us.
And also you had this ability to always turn games around.
You were in a losing position a lot of times in this tournament.
That's quite admirable as well.
So you never gave up.
You always found an equaliser and turned the game around.
So that's something that has to count for something as well.
When you say you played well, I'm actually not so sure.
I thought your best game was against the Netherlands.
And yes, in the final, I agree, you did quite well.
The first half was boring from both teams.
And then in the second half, there was a spell after you scored that equaliser
where you should have really killed them off.
I thought you were on top of them, but didn't materialise, unfortunately, for you.
I was going to say something very profound, Ben, and I've completely forgotten what it was.
But yes, it's a bit of a mystery, isn't it?
Is Garth Southgate a great manager who's brilliant,
or is he just like kind of crap and responsible for us performing badly
and disappointing everyone?
Did we play well? Did we play badly?
That's it.
The moments when we played very well were when we conceded a goal.
And suddenly it's like, oh shit, we actually have to play football here.
Come on.
We actually need to actually try hard and be creative and come up with something here.
So that's weird, isn't it, that without that motivation,
which was like, oh, we're going to lose now, we're losing.
Without that motivation, we were just a bit dull in the head or something.
And maybe, as you said, maybe it's stress, maybe it's the pressure,
maybe everyone's a bit tired.
I don't know.
But without that really obvious immediate sense of motivation,
which is like, oh, God, we're a goal behind.
Without that, we sort of lacked motivation somehow.
And yet you were not the only team who was like that as well.
You should mention that.
There were other teams.
France, I would mention France, Italy.
The other teams, they didn't seem to chase the score line much.
We haven't seen, we only saw it in the opening game.
Germany kind of destroyed Scotland.
That was the only one.
And then Spain won by three goals once or twice.
And that's about it from what I remember.
Most of the games weren't like very, even when I expected Portugal to absolutely thrash the Czech team,
didn't happen either.
It was a bit, I think, as you said, the gap between the arguably the big boys,
the big teams and the smaller teams has been getting smaller and smaller.
I think the football is evening out.
Yeah, maybe, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
And everyone's talking about England, England, England, England, when are we going to win another one?
There's loads of other teams who've never won it, never even sniffed it,
who, you know, they imagine how they feel.
No one's ever talking about them, about the Scotlands of this world,
who are just so fed up with being either not qualifying or getting knocked out
and then listening to everyone talking about England all the time on the TV.
I mean, they must be so fed up with it.
Maybe also, maybe another factor is the weather, you know,
like a lot of these European teams don't play football in the summer.
And it's been very hot and humid in Germany this month.
So that might account for some of that low energy kind of, you know, when it's hot and humid, it's hard to...
The southern teams have an advantage.
But I should also say, Luke, this was the first time ever that England got to the final outside their home soil, right?
So outside their own country.
So basically you have broken that record, at least.
I would be feeling so much more positive about it all for those reasons if we just played better football.
If what I'd seen on the pitch had made me feel excited
and made me feel that we were playing to the best of our abilities,
if we got the formula right, then I would be feeling pretty great.
And also sort of like weirdly, as you said, cognitive dissonance,
I'd be feeling good about the state of English football,
but I'd also be very disappointed that we didn't win it if we'd been playing great football.
Because as you said, yeah, great achievement. We got to the final outside of the UK.
You know, it's the best we've done for ages.
But that's all on paper. Everything's good on paper.
But in terms of what I saw England doing over the last couple of weeks,
it's been a frustrating, disappointing affair.
This is tricky. If you had won it, you wouldn't be talking like this.
Because let me tell you something. It's not always that the best team wins.
It's not always like that.
The Czech team got to the final in 1994.
It was a European Cup in the UK, I think.
No, that was 1996.
What did I say?
1994 was the World Cup in the USA.
We got to the final by playing terrible football.
And we got to the final somehow.
Then Greece, that year where we had absolutely by far the best team,
everybody was saying we had the best team, 2004,
Greece won it with absolutely horrible football.
We were beaten by them in the semi-final, so were the Portuguese in the final.
Sometimes this happens.
We were all afraid this would happen this year with either France or you guys.
That a team with really bad football would win.
But if you had won, you would still count it.
Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah, of course.
It's a funny old game, isn't it? It's a funny old game.
Yeah, a lot of it's luck. A lot of it's just like a little toe poke here
and a little slip here and there and then just a penalty that's given
that shouldn't be given.
Or just some butterfly flaps its wings in a football stadium somewhere
and then a gust of wind pushes a ball a little bit too far.
Or like David Beckham takes a penalty and the ball just moves very slightly
to the right as he's taking it. All those sorts of things.
It's just these factors that are the sort of acts of God
that you can't really account for as well.
Absolutely. But that's why we love this sport.
And Luke, I think in a few days' time you will see this as success.
Two back-to-back finals. It's pretty good.
I would say it's pretty good. Yeah, I think so.
And your players, those world-class players that we mentioned,
look at their age. They can get really good.
And I'm even adding Palmer to that mix because he's...
Not just because of the goal. He's great.
Anyway, Luke, it was pretty good. Yeah, pretty good.
Anyway, Luke, I don't want to hold you any longer.
So thank you very much for being on the podcast again.
Yeah, nice one. Thanks a lot for inviting me.
It's nice to be able to talk about football.
Yeah, cool. I can't wait for the next big international tournament.
I'm very curious to see who England are going to get as their next manager
because Southgate has already said that he said before the tournament
that he would stand down. This was his last competition.
Oh, really? Because after the final, he said,
there's no time to talk about this now. We will talk later.
I think there's still some kind of wiggle room for him staying.
Personally, I think it wouldn't be the worst thing,
but if he's put under so much pressure by the media and the fans,
maybe he will choose to stand down.
Anyway, Luke, it's been fantastic to talk to you again.
Thank you very much for all your footballing insight.
And good luck to Luke's English podcast as well.
Thank you, Stenek. All right. Good luck to the Footglitch podcast too.
Nice one. Cheers.
Take care, man. Bye-bye.
Welcome back. In this part of the show, it's going to be just me.
And as always, this is the language corner.
What is the language corner?
No one is going to take a corner, in fact. No one.
It's not as in football where one team can take a corner
and it's a set piece and a chance to score a goal
because the player is kicking the ball into the box.
No, it's not what's happening here.
It's the language corner, you see?
That's when I actually do my job, because I love talking about football.
Of course I do.
And I love inviting guests like Luke Thompson onto my podcast,
but I also have to do my job, right?
We all have a job. My job is an English teacher.
So this time I would like to explain the phrase that Luke used.
He said that football is a funny old game.
You may remember we used it or he used it. I didn't do that.
I'm not going to take credit for that.
But Luke used this phrase when I was sort of expressing the point of football
sometimes being quite unpredictable,
that sometimes the defensive-minded teams win,
like Greece and the Czech team won, almost won.
The Czech team didn't win, but almost won Euro 1996.
I actually made a mistake in the year. I feel so embarrassed.
But it can happen to the best of us, right?
It was a long time ago.
Anyway, Luke said, yeah, Zdenek, you are right.
Football is a funny old game.
So this is quite a popular phrase, almost a cliché phrase.
That is used in British English to express the unpredictability
and the ironic nature of situation typically related to sports,
especially football.
It reflects the idea that the outcomes in sports can be unexpected
and humorous in their unpredictability.
Yeah, you can also use this phrase in a broader context to live situations
that are unpredictable, where things don't always go as expected.
And the results can be surprising and amusing.
Football is a funny old game.
Now, learn that one. It's a nice phrase to know.
OK, that's it. That's the language bit for today.
Done and dusted.
And one thing that remains to say is, please don't forget to subscribe
to the Footgrish podcast.
You can listen to the Footgrish podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts.
So hit the subscribe button not to miss any future episodes.
Thank you very much for listening and I'll speak to you soon. Bye bye.