You're listening to the Footglish podcast. Love football, learn English.
What were the highlights and low points of Euro 2024?
Which teams played well and which teams were rubbish?
How did the referees do?
And how many different ways of saying a lot of in English do you know?
Hello listeners, welcome to another episode of the Footglish podcast.
My name is Denek Lukas and this is a podcast for all learners of English who love football.
So today I am recording my Euro 2024 takeaways and I'm going to go through them right now and tell you what I think.
And there's no guest today as you may have already noticed.
Yeah, it's just me.
So hopefully we will survive together and you will enjoy this episode.
So what I will say is that there were loads of interesting moments in this tournament.
By the way, remember this phrase.
This is what I will be explaining in the language corner.
Just a spoiler to start with.
OK, so loads of interesting moments in this tournament.
But I also have to say that it was kind of a mix of good and bad.
Yeah, it was not all good, but that's football for you.
It's always like this, isn't it?
Football brings all kinds of emotions, not just the good ones.
And that's because, well, that's the nature of any kind of sports competition.
You've got winners, but you've got losers.
The winners are happy, the losers are not so happy.
I would say they are quite sad.
Right. And often there are these emotions of unfairness, right?
When the decisions of authorities are wrong.
So you've got some rules in football as well, rules that should be followed.
And you've got the referees and the video assistant referees, VAR, V-A-R,
to basically enforce these rules.
And when these rules are not enforced in the right way,
well, then it also brings negative emotions, of course.
Now we have football fans, we have social media.
So, you know, altogether it creates an interesting mixture of emotions, doesn't it?
And well, this tournament was full of them, that's for sure.
What I will say is that there were too many boring matches for my liking.
There were some really good games as well, especially in the group stages.
But then when the playoffs started, when the knockout stages got underway,
I would say that the matches were sometimes a bit lackluster.
And that's because the tactics were really important
and way too many managers went for the tactic of not conceding or defending a draw.
And I don't like it so much, but you kind of have to understand it.
That's part of football. I guess it's easier.
I don't know if it's more effective, though.
But hopefully in the future something will be done about this.
I mean, when I say something will be done about this, you can change a few rules.
In football, I suppose you can make the goal bigger, for example.
That would be one idea.
And then hopefully it will be easier to score goals.
That's one idea.
Or hopefully there will be a different trend in football, a trend of more offensive football.
But we will see about that.
Yeah, but as I said, too many matches, too pragmatic, kind of mediocre performances from some teams.
Unfortunately, what we have to say is that defensive football is not dead.
You don't need to play beautiful football to win games,
especially if you have extra time and penalties as well.
And that's why teams like France and England got really far in the tournament.
France were knocked out in the semifinal, lost to Spain, and England lost to Spain in the final.
So in the end, beautiful football won, Spain were the best team, of course, of the tournament,
and they actually played really well.
They scored 15 goals.
They set up positively.
They actually wanted to win.
And I think it makes sense that they were the ones who beat those two teams, France and England, those two big, big teams.
I mean, everybody was mentioning France and England.
That's because we just expect more from these teams when we look at the individual players.
They have so much quality and they are world class.
And you just want to see more from players like Bape and, I don't know, Griezmann and Bellingham and Foden and Harry Kane, of course.
Yeah, they didn't show enough.
OK, another thing that I noticed was that there were no weak teams.
And I have said it a few times during my podcast that I believe that the gap between the big teams, right,
the teams that everybody considers as the big teams and the arguably the small teams has been getting smaller.
It's really hard to play against even smaller teams these days because the quality of these teams has just gone up.
And, yeah, even teams like Slovenia, they got three points, they basically progressed into the last 16 and there they lost on penalties, if I remember clearly, to Portugal.
So basically, this is a team that didn't lose in normal time, right?
Then we've got Georgia, who also produced some amazing football, and they also made it out of their group.
Yeah, so these teams that nobody thought would do well did amazingly well.
So that's, I think, a good thing because that will make these tournaments more challenging for everyone.
And also it will give more hope to smaller nations that if they work hard and produce some good footballers, they have a chance if they play as a team as well.
Yeah, that's another sort of theme of the tournament, right?
But some countries, they played more as a team, you know, so you have got players that are not that well known, don't play for big clubs, but still did very well.
Another team I could mention is Slovakia.
I know they have some players in bigger leagues, but on the whole, you would say it's one of the smaller teams.
But what's the phrase? The sum, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, right?
So basically, these teams did really well and that's good for football.
Yeah, and also it will make it harder for the big teams to win something.
Yeah, I actually think that England might be in for some less successful times, you know, because it's something that they don't realize.
But this manager, Gareth Southgate, did really well with them.
Yeah, so you should say be careful what you wish for.
Yeah, because everyone was criticizing Gareth Southgate, but now it might be harder for them to win something.
And part of it is because of all these small teams, right?
Also, this point leads me to the idea that more teams don't make the tournament worse.
You know, we have heard this many times in the recent years that increasing the number of teams in these big, big tournaments makes these tournaments worse,
which kind of makes sense as an argument, doesn't it?
Because, well, smaller teams will qualify and smaller teams will be thrashed by the big guns, right?
But that didn't happen in the Euro.
It might be the case in the World Cup, but in the Euros, I think it went pretty well.
And I'm OK with this number of participants, actually.
I think the critics were proven wrong in this case.
Another thing we should say is that not many goals were scored.
And, well, that's something that is closely tied to the other thing that I already mentioned, and that's that these games were led in a tactical way.
Everybody took the approach of better safe than sorry.
It's a shame. We want to see more goals.
I think the ball was or had been well prepared or well made.
There were some great long range shots.
The trajectory of the ball seemed to be interesting, so we cannot blame the ball.
I don't think we can blame the stadiums because in Germany you have excellent stadiums.
So we have to blame the not the weather.
We are not blaming the weather.
We have to blame the tactics, really, of the teams that thought that whenever they were, let's say, one nil up,
they didn't feel it was necessary to score more goals, you know, to kill the game off because probably they were saving energy for the next game or something like that.
There must be some reasons behind this.
This is probably the trend. I don't like to see this.
I would rather see more goals.
And that's why, for example, the Premier League is more fun, right, because there are always more goals there.
But for some reason we have seen a lot of own goals.
Yeah, that's right.
Ten own goals.
Own goal is the top goal scorer of the euro.
Own goal won the Golden Boot.
Speaking of the Golden Boot, who won the Golden Boot?
I think it was six players.
It was Mikal Tadze from Georgia.
I will probably miss someone, right?
Gakpo from Netherlands, Harry Kane from England.
It was Dani Olmo from Spain.
It was Ivan Schrantz from Slovakia and Jamal Musiala from Germany.
I think I said six, right?
So it was six players, which is rather unusual.
And it shows that we did not really have a real goal scorer this tournament.
We had a lot of a lot of them, which I guess is a bad thing.
Because again, you want to see someone smashing it, right?
Someone scoring braces and hat tricks.
Well, we had none of that in this tournament.
So, yeah, that's interesting.
And why so many own goals?
Well, I have no idea.
I guess the players wanted to score but didn't realize it was their own goal.
No, that can't be the reason.
No, it can't be the fact that they wanted to be on the score sheet.
No, they were just unlucky.
I guess a lot of frantic defending took place.
And sometimes it's just so easy when a ball just goes into the six yard box.
It's just so easy to really try hard.
And often it's a situation that the defender is making a last ditch clearance or something, right?
Some sort of last instance of a block.
Because if the defender doesn't make that kind of block, well,
then the pass that someone is making will get to someone, a striker, and that player will score a goal.
So sometimes you're just doing your best to prevent a goal.
And as a result, you hit the back of the net.
But unfortunately, there's nothing to celebrate because it's your own goal.
Yeah, it was partially hilarious that we had so many own goals, but partly it's nothing unusual, really.
This is part of football. Yeah.
Okay. Fans. I think fans were amazing.
Fans were great.
I know some nations were published for singing some racial chants and some stuff that is forbidden.
Again, this is football fans for you.
Some of them don't really think when they are in a big crowd.
They are just following their instincts.
It's not an excuse.
I'm just saying we've always had those things.
I'm not excusing it.
It should definitely be fined and you should punish it.
So I'm okay with that.
But at the same time, it doesn't really surprise me.
Yeah, much better than during the COVID time.
So compared to the previous Euro, this one was more fun when it comes to fans.
Also, it was more fun because it was only in one country,
not like before when it was hosted by how many countries?
20 different countries.
And we even had a match in Azerbaijan.
This is way more convenient for the players, for the fans.
It's just in one place.
It's the right way to do it.
Okay. Sometimes when you have smaller countries, you can co-host the tournament.
We had great tournaments in Belgium, Netherlands.
We had a tournament in Poland and Ukraine.
I'm fine with that.
If it's neighboring countries, it's absolutely cool with me.
But please don't do the same thing you did during Euro.
Please don't do that.
Wait a minute.
Isn't it going to happen soon with the World Cup?
Mm hmm.
Yeah, I really don't like it.
I absolutely hate it.
But well, I'm not the person who decides these things.
So, you know, what can I do?
Nothing.
I can only talk about it here on the Footgrish podcast, I guess.
Yeah.
But the atmosphere was great.
Yeah.
And also it's great that it was played in Germany because it's a traditional football country.
I don't want tournaments in places like Qatar.
Sorry.
It's not for me.
No.
No, thank you.
Okay.
Social media are more and more toxic, divisive, unfriendly, a lot of cyber bullying going
on.
I try not to read it, but occasionally you kind of have to.
You don't escape it.
And I noticed some funny memes.
I watched a few short videos.
But to be honest, most of all, I listen to podcasts about football.
And there are a lot of good podcasts about football, not just this one.
There are other podcasts available, of course.
And it's a great source of information.
And it's also a great opportunity to work on your English, which we all need.
So, yeah.
Okay.
We also have to mention the last dance of the old guards.
We've already talked about Ronaldo.
Veterans like him are unlikely to feature again.
Pepe said his last goodbye.
Tony Kross as well, some Croatian players like Luka Modric, also Olivier Giroud announced
his retirement from international football and possibly a few more.
It's always sad, right, to see these players go, but it has to happen.
It's part of football.
And I think the trick is to go when you're on the high.
So, were there any Spanish footballers that ended their career now?
I don't know, but if they did, this is the best time to go because you will be remembered
as a winner.
Yeah.
So sometimes it's hard to choose a moment like that.
Right.
I think Messi has just won the Copa America and I think he will keep going.
So, yeah, I mean, it's ultimately their decision.
Now, another interesting theme is we had some amazing young players on the rise.
Yeah.
So as a contrast to the last dance of the old guards, we had some amazing young talents
making a breakthrough.
And it seems to me like at this point, there are a lot of young players who seem to be
more mature than maybe a few years ago.
To me, it seems like maybe they now realize that to be a good footballer, you just have
to sacrifice everything to football.
I think maybe it's not like in the past when the teenagers, they would go partying and
drink a lot and smoke and stuff like that.
I think that's probably why we have some young players.
Like, of course, everybody, everybody will remember Lamin Jamal, who scored a goal in
semifinal.
It was the decisive goal, actually.
It was the winner against France, I believe.
Right.
Or was it the equalizer?
I can't remember.
Oh, yeah.
He's called the equalizer.
Sorry.
But the point is he was only 16 years old when it happened.
The youngest goal scorer of all time.
So that's incredible.
He's just a kid.
And he still goes to high school and look at him.
But there were other amazing young players that played a huge role in their teams.
Alda Guler and his goal for Turkey.
We will all remember that.
Hvisha Kvaraskerja, the Georgian player.
His performances were epic.
Jude Bellingham, he was a little bit meh.
He had some moments.
He scored an amazing bicycle goal against Slovakia.
But I think everybody expected more from him.
But he's a wonderful player, of course.
Then we have Florian Wirtz, a wonderful kid from Germany.
He scored a goal or two.
I can't remember exactly.
Yeah.
So this is great to see.
It's fun to see these players succeed at a young age.
Of course, it's always a tough act to follow, right?
If you play well at a tournament like that and then the expectations will go up.
So you have to prove it.
You have to be consistent.
And sometimes young players find it hard to be consistent.
So we will see what happens next.
We also saw some really tired players, maybe some players fighting with injuries.
It's possible that they were even hiding some injuries or they played despite being injured.
And that's because they were needed for their team.
Tomas Socek from the Czech team was one of those players.
Apparently he was struggling with a knee problem, a small knee problem.
Then we had Harry Kane, also seemed a bit unfit.
And I'm sure there were some other players.
We even had Mbappe with a mask, who had to play with a mask because he broke his nose in the first game.
But we also had a weird thing with penalties.
I don't know if you noticed, but some penalty takers decided to stop their runs when they were taking their penalties.
Notably Robert Lewandowski from Poland.
I actually kind of hate this thing.
I think it's bullshit.
I guess they want more goals.
So they are giving the penalty takers an advantage.
But I think it's bullshit.
I don't think you should be able to do this.
I don't like it.
It doesn't look good.
It looks stupid.
And I even think that it's not necessarily an advantage.
I suppose if you master it, I suppose it can be an advantage.
But yeah, it seems like a different sport to me.
I'm not a big fan of this.
Yeah, please.
Can you remove it again?
Referees, if any of you are referees and are listening to this, I would like you to remove this.
Speaking of referees and VAR, I actually thought VAR was amazing in the previous tournament and referees were great in the COVID tournament.
But now, honestly, not so much.
Germany were robbed with the kukurela incident.
It was a handball.
Everybody saw that.
I don't understand why that wasn't a penalty.
So that thing, of course, happened.
Tony Cross also should have been sent off after making some really bad tackles, injuring a player from Spain as well.
Czech Republic were robbed.
Nobody's talking about the Czechs, but we were also robbed.
Our goal should not have been disallowed.
We got a harsh red card after two yellow cards, which were yellow cards.
But in the context of what was happening in some other matches, it seemed really harsh.
By the way, did I tell you that I actually am the reason for this?
Because I had placed a bet on a few things before the Euro.
And one of them was that a player will get sent off before the 25th minute.
The odds were good.
It was, I think, one to three.
So I won a triple of what I bet.
But unfortunately, it was the Czech player that got sent off.
So I didn't want that to happen.
Of course.
Yeah, it was Antonin Barak.
But yeah, it just seemed weird.
Some of the things that happened in some matches.
I don't know.
Erdogan wasn't happy either because the Turkish players got banned a lot.
And also one of their players got banned for that wolf gesture, which is, I guess, banned in Germany.
So the player shouldn't have done it.
But in Turkey, I spoke to my Turkish student.
Apparently, it's normal there.
But in Germany, it's associated with a far-right terrorist movement.
So I don't know, honestly.
But it's weird that Jude Bellingham made a really bad gesture,
really obscene gesture towards the Slovakian bench, apparently.
And he only got fined.
So for me, it was about consistency and fairness.
And if you want to punish people, well, at least punish them in a similar way.
Don't punish them differently.
And that's my issue.
The handball rule.
Oh, my God.
I don't understand it.
I don't think anyone does.
The way yellow cards were given, weird, really weird.
Sometimes a small foul is a yellow card.
Other times, a really bad tackle is not.
It's still a problem in the inconsistency.
I understand that every referee is different and it's just a different flavor, I suppose.
And in that way, it's interesting.
But you can understand some teams that they complained, right?
You can kind of understand it.
I suppose the offside was sorted.
The offside technology works quite well.
The way they draw the line, I think it was quick as well.
The technology is great.
The goal line technology also works great as usual.
But basically, it's just the handball and the fouls.
Yeah, I'm not sure about that.
I suppose partly you can understand it because some of these things are kind of open to interpretation, right?
You can look at them from different angles and you can understand them slightly differently.
So I suppose that's fine.
Then we had a referee, Felix Zweier, who has previously been banned from football for accepting a bribe.
But he was in charge of the semifinal.
And everybody remembers that penalty incident, that Dumfries foul on Kane.
And it was barely a foul.
The Dutch feel hard done by and I can understand them, honestly.
And he is still a referee, this referee, even after accepting a bribe several years ago.
I suppose you could say that you should give people more chances when they mess up, make mistakes.
But you know what?
I feel like sometimes if you give someone another chance, you can.
But should they be in charge of a game of Euro 2024 semifinal?
I'm not so sure.
As for the final Spain-England, I thought it was an OK final.
I quite enjoyed it, even though the first half was a snooze fest.
I did not like the first half.
Second half was more fun.
The best team won in the end.
I would say that not the best teams featured in the semifinal, though.
I was missing Germany, Switzerland, Austria, even Turkey.
I enjoyed Turkey in this tournament.
And instead we had France, the Netherlands, who were OK, I suppose.
But England? No, England, honestly.
They have been waiting for a big trophy for over 50 years now.
The last time they won was in 1966.
Yeah, they are very unhappy about this, of course.
But I think they have been doing really well in the last few years.
So they should be proud of their team.
They should be proud of their manager.
Their manager, Gareth Southgate, who decided to step down.
He resigned yesterday, actually.
Also Harry Kane. Oh my God.
He has cursed this player, right?
The only thing he has won so far is an Audi Cup, which nobody knows what it is.
Some kind of Mickey Mouse Cup.
But he has lost every single final he was involved in.
Partially because he used to play for Tottenham Hotspur.
And as we know, Tottenham, they never really win anything.
But also now he lost two back-to-back finals with England.
And he also lost or he didn't win anything with Bayern Munich last season.
So hopefully next season he can really lift this curse.
Because I'm almost starting to feel sorry for him.
And that's coming from an Arsenal fan.
So yeah, overall I would say an enjoyable tournament.
Not perfect, but fun.
The best team won.
And the team that has one of the longest waits of all teams, their manager resigned.
Which is strange.
But also understandable.
Of course they want some fresh ideas in England.
But yeah, I enjoyed this tournament.
I hope you did too.
And I hope you enjoyed me making this podcast.
Now it sounds like I'm done with this podcast, but don't worry, I'm not.
It's just the end of season one.
So season two will be coming soon.
But first things first, now let's deal with the language corner.
Okay, welcome back.
This is the language corner.
And this is where I teach you something because I'm an English teacher.
So I have to do my job.
And this time let's talk about the phrase.
There were loads of interesting moments in this tournament.
What's loads of?
Loads of is just another way of saying lots of.
Loads of is one of those words called quantifiers, which are used to express quantity.
And I'd like to have a look at them today.
We have words like loads of, plenty of, a lot of, lots of, many and others.
Which we can cover here.
Let's start with the example.
So loads of is used with countable and uncountable nouns.
So we can say loads of goals, loads of good performances.
Sometimes we use it without of.
Sometimes we just say loads, yellow cards, let's say.
It's very informal and it emphasizes a very large amount.
Which will be similar to the other expressions that I will be explaining today.
Then we have a lot of, which I guess is the most common one.
It's again used with both countable and uncountable nouns.
What are countable and uncountable nouns?
Countable nouns are nouns we can count, like players.
A lot of players, a lot of balls, a lot of goals.
Uncountable nouns are words like water, freedom.
For example, this player has been given a lot of freedom.
So uncountable noun.
Players have to drink a lot of water, otherwise they get dehydrated.
Something like that.
Plenty or plenty of.
Again, this one is used with countable and uncountable nouns.
And it has a similar meaning, but it also indicates the idea that you have more than enough of something.
So there are plenty of interesting moments in this euro, you could say.
And then we have many, which is the most formal one.
It indicates a large number.
You can say many goals.
It's often used in negatives as well.
You could say not so many opportunities in this game.
Or not so many interesting moments in this tournament.
And then you've got others like several, which is used with countable nouns.
Numerous, also used with countable nouns.
Quite a few, which actually means a lot.
Quite a few, what could we say?
There were quite a few good saves from goalkeepers this tournament.
For example, my favorite one was, I can't remember the goalkeeper's name, but it's the Dutch keeper.
It was the safe of the tournament against a Turkish player.
And one last one I want to tell you about is a great deal of, which I think is slightly more formal.
And that one is used only with uncountable nouns.
So for example, you could say a great deal of information, a great deal of knowledge.
So be careful, that one cannot be used with countable nouns.
So you cannot say, for example, Zdenek recorded a great deal of podcasts.
No, you cannot say that.
Okay, so I guess that will be it, listeners.
Thank you very much for listening.
As I said, this is the end of season one.
But don't worry, season two of this podcast will start really soon.
I want to talk about the Czech League a little bit because it starts literally this Friday.
And we also have Champions League qualifiers underway.
Round one has already started, so Czech teams will be in it.
We've got two Czech clubs. One is in round two, one is in round three.
So hopefully at least one of these two teams will make it.
It's of course, Sparta and Slavia.
And also this season in Czech League, the winner of the league will go directly into the Champions League next year.
And that's because our coefficient is so good.
So from that point of view, it will be an interesting season.
So I'll definitely speak about the Czech League a little bit, even though I don't consider myself an expert.
But that's fine. Yeah, that's okay.
I also want to talk about the Premier League, of course.
I think it will be one of the biggest sort of topics on this podcast in the future.
The Premier League, because that's the league I like watching the most.
I'll be honest with you. I support Arsenal.
I also like watching any teams that have Czech players in them.
So West Ham United is one of my favorite teams as well.
I have a soft spot for them.
And yeah, we will be covering all that on the Footgrish podcast.
Also, the Fantasy Premier League has started.
Actually, it started today.
You can create your team again and they've made some interesting changes there.
So I think I will dedicate one podcast to the Fantasy Premier League because, of course, I want to have a league for us, a mini league, a Footgrish podcast mini league.
I want us to compete against each other.
If you follow the Premier League, I think we can have some fun together as well.
Yeah, OK, well, I guess that's it for today.
Thank you very much for listening.
And don't forget, there are ways you can support me because, of course, I cannot do this podcast without you.
I need you guys. I'm making it for you.
Right. You're my audience.
You're my listeners.
And in order to keep me motivated, I need to see that this audience is growing, that we have more and more listeners.
And obviously, it's partially on me.
I have to keep producing good content, but also I could use some help from you.
So please make sure you tell your friends about this podcast.
Please share it on your social media and keep spreading.
I wanted to say keep spreading love, but I suppose it's kind of love.
Right. Keep spreading the word about this podcast, please.
It will help me a lot.
OK, listeners, that's it for today.
I've been talking too much.
This is the longest episode of all time.
Thank you very much for listening.
And I'll speak to you soon.
Take care. Bye bye.