You're listening to the Footglish podcast. Love football, learn English.
What on earth is happening with Spurs this season?
Who is more critical of the Spurs keeper Antonín Kinski? English fans or Czech fans?
Are most Tottenham fans post-Eco glue out now? And what does banter mean?
Hello everybody, welcome back to the Footglish podcast. My name is Denik Lukas and I'm
the host of this show. This is a podcast for English learners who fancy improving and developing
their English listening skills and learning some vocabulary in the process. And it's all about
football as well. And there's always almost always a guest and today is a very special guest because
it's none other than my friend Ondra and his cat. Hey, this is Asali. He decided to join me on podcast.
That wasn't part of a plan in the first time. Wow, what a beautiful cat that is. Yes,
Siberian one. Siberian cat. Wonderful, very white and kind of fluffy, furry and fluffy.
Yeah, I apologize to all listeners. I'm not English native, so I'll do a lot of mistakes.
I'm just apologizing in advance. No need to apologize. We are not so, you know,
we don't take it that seriously. I'm a teacher, but it's not my job. I just want to have a guest
who is knowledgeable about football. And I know you are because we used to play football together
for one team as well. Do you remember that? Oh, yeah, we used to play for pretty long time.
Could have been like seven years, six years, something like that. Something like six, seven years.
Yeah. Yeah. It was at the end of my career when my skills got much worse and I wasn't as good as
I used to be, unfortunately. But I think we had some good times together as well. We did. Yeah.
Yes. It was a village, village team. Right. We played for Vrboval Hota. Yes, we did. You are the one
who brought me there. I wasn't playing for any other club back then. I was just playing football
for fun. And you are also playing football for time. Yeah. Not just for the club, but also for fun.
So you asked me, hey, Andrzej, you like football? You're not that terrible. So let's go to Vrboval Hota.
Then we played together. At that time, I already knew you were a Tottenham fan,
which, to be honest, makes things a little bit more complicated as I'm an Arsenal fan myself. So
there was a bit of, let's say, back and forth between us, right? A little bit of taking the
piss out of each other because it's banter. It's part of football fan culture, right?
Most of the time it was a friendly banter. Yes. Not always. Most of the time. Most of the time,
definitely. But when we were on the same team, when we played together, then we usually were
nice to each other. We tried to pass the ball and, you know, praised each other for good effort and
so on. Right. Exactly. And that was important. But when it comes to supporting the English Premier League
club, you are a Spurs fan. I can see that you're wearing a shirt, a Spurs shirt. Which one is this?
Which year is this from? I think it's 2009-2010. Awake it back when Manchin was a sponsor.
And yeah, it was like a one year after we won League Cup, which was our last trophy.
And yeah, this is also, I'm going to show you, this is Aaron Lennon's dress, which is one of the
two of the footballers that brought me supporting Tottenham. The other one was Dimitar Barbatos,
who happened to be, who turned out to be Manchester United legend later. Yeah. These guys were amazing.
So I, back then also there was like a TV, I think it was commercial TV, was playing Premier League
matches. Can you imagine like playing Premier League, broadcasting Premier League matches for
free? Like just on cable TV, crazy times. And yeah, they were like showing one match week,
one match weekly. And quite a lot, it was Tottenham because they were scoring a lot of goals, also
receiving a lot of goals. Conceded. It was their favourite teams because they received a lot of
goals. Conceded. But Ondra, to be honest, I really, I have to say at the beginning of this season,
or let's say the first half of the season, this is something I would never thought I would say,
but I actually kind of did enjoy the way you played. And I thought it was highly enjoyable
to watch you score a lot of goals, but also concede a lot of goals as a supporter of a rival club.
But in a way, I had respect for your manager, but I think it all kind of went the other way, right?
It's going south, yeah. And we'll see if it's gonna get better. But so far, not great. We play
offensive football. We have a coach who's respected and who's like praised for saying the things how
they are. He was appointed after disappointment of two previous coaches who were considered to be
too defensive, too boring. So we played somebody, we hired somebody who was the opposite. And the
results are much worse than his predecessors. Does it mean that you as Tottenham fans now,
you miss the good old Jose Mourinho or Antonio Conte? Not really. If I miss anybody from that
era, I miss Pocateino, who also played offensive football and the football was successful.
You got into the Champions League final. I remember that.
Yeah, that was actually like a swan song of our team. I think the peak of our football was like
two seasons before. To be honest, I believe that we like fluked our way into the Champions League
final, but it wasn't the era where we played our best football. We were bad at Premier League at
that time. And like two or three seasons back, we were constantly fighting for the titles.
And we played great football. It was the great era. So for me, the Champions League wasn't the
top Tottenham. But you were close to that title that you have been alluding for so long, especially
players like Harry Kane, of course, he's a legend, but everybody keeps saying there's no trophies in
his trophy cabinet. So it's a bit like you are considered one of the better clubs, let's say top
six, even though I don't think that exists anymore. But like for the last one or two decades,
you've been one of the top six clubs, but still you haven't managed to win much. So that must be
a bit frustrating for your fans. But let's talk about this season. So we are talking right after
you also exited the FA Cup and League Cup as well. So it's like in one week, you got knocked out of
two cups basically. So the last defeat was, I believe, was yesterday or two days ago?
I think it was two days ago, I don't know. It's a short period of time. Yeah, it was again,
it was against Aston Villa. Basically, as you as you probably know, in Czech Republic, Spurs are
being watched a lot currently because Spurs signed on the recently like a month ago, they signed
a football goalkeeper Antonin Kinski from Slovakia. That's one of the questions I wanted to really
talk to you about here on the Footgris podcast. Because it's, as you know, I am Czech, just like
you, we didn't say that. And so I do talk about Czech players more than some people might like,
but it is what it is. So what do you make of his performances so far? Has he hit the ground running?
Well, Antonin Kinski, he got like a dream debut on the first leg against Liverpool.
He was great. He played with his feet a lot. He was full of confidence. He was spreading the
confidence around to other guys. And it seemed like a perfect honeymoon. It didn't last long,
it lasted like a week. And yeah, he had some blunders. Like when I was speaking, especially
at work with my colleagues who watch football a lot, they've been more criticizing him than
what I read in England, like Spurs fans and in general pundits were saying like, hey, he's still
pretty good. Like when our first goalkeeper who's got injured before, Vicario, when he's gonna get
back, he's gonna have a tough time putting on the badge this young prospect from Czech Republic.
And he got, he did, some people probably won't know, he played a league game against Aston Villa
and he didn't save pretty easy shot. From an angle. It was from an angle. Like it was a
strong shot, but close to him in the first minute of the game. So that for me decided that he'll
have to keep fighting for his spot in the team. I think still Czechs will follow the team. I think
he'll have some regular time in the team, but he has still a lot to learn.
Yeah, absolutely. I think you're right in saying that Czech fans are probably more critical of him.
I think the reason is because we remember him from Slavia and how good he was at Slavia,
the kind of confidence he had. And maybe there are a lot of Sparta fans who are like now
poking the bear a little bit as well, right? They're trying to...
Well, that's a part of it. I mean, in general, when people are like rating him after every match,
when he played, everybody was like, hey, how do you rate this? How do you do? Did you see that
moment? I think people being fair, at least those I talked with. But I think it's like a habit in
England to be a little less critical towards younger players. You are right. But also, I think
now he has made a few mistakes. And I know what you're talking about. In this last game
against Aston Villa, you lost 1-2-1 in the end and unfortunately conceding a goal in the first minute
away from home, it doesn't help the team. But it's just, he still isn't the main reason.
You are so bad. I'm sorry, but you had no chances in that game, right?
Definitely in the team. And yes, we're having for record, like, there are like 10 injured 18 players.
Maybe a little more. It's a terrible season. And even with the players we currently have,
the coach should do probably better. You're down to the bare bones, as they say in England.
You're down to the bare bones. And I know Posterco glue uses it as an excuse a lot.
And you can only use it so long, in my opinion, because at some point something has to change,
right? Something will have to change and you will have to start doing better because you're still
a Spurs. You're not supposed to keep losing like that. There was a chance, you had a chance in League
Cup because the first game at home you managed to win one nil. So there was a second leg
at Anfield and that you lost as well. So you're out of both Cups.
And now it's not only in the Europa League and Premier League, obviously. That never ends.
And you're still in Europa League, right? You're still in Europa League.
Yeah. Now would be, I guess, like a question is why he hasn't been sucked yet. Because,
as mentioned earlier in this podcast, his predecessors had little better results.
Mourinho and Antonio Conte. And there might be, there are some reasons people say. We don't know,
obviously. We can only speculate. But there have been, like I heard, like we're playing attacking
football. It's more like a fun for, it's more enjoyable for the fans, even though the results
are terrible. Then there's like, we maybe sucked the previous coaches prematurely, especially like
Jose Mourinho. There was a situation when Jose Mourinho was bad in Premier League and he got into
the League Cup final. And he was sucked before the final, so he didn't have a chance to actually
bring us a trophy. So I think that might be, that's also like a strong argument. Maybe the
owner of the team, maybe, sorry, owner of the Tottenham Hotspur, the man in charge, Daniel Levy,
he's like, hey, let's give him his chance. If he wins the Cup, then he can continue.
And there's a third reason I heard. And it's very interesting that maybe the club is for sale.
And in general, you don't want to sell your manager, bring another guy, because the new
owner will probably want to bring his own stuff, his own guy. So you cannot suck two managers in a
short time. So that might be the thing. There might be ongoing negotiations about the club takeover.
That's speculation, but one of them must be true. Okay, then what would you want? This is the last
question. What would you want to happen then? I don't know if a new owner will always be better.
So I'm neutral in that sense. I just want us to keep playing nice, quality football. I don't want
to get bored. Like even though if we play some zero, zero game, we get a point, which is more
than zero. But I want us to keep continue playing the way you are. So would you keep so would you
be okay with keeping Postekoglu and giving him more time? Probably not. If I were in charge,
I would have been sucking him months ago. But then I don't know all the available information.
I'm not the owner. I'm just the owner. My job is to support the club no matter what.
My job is you paid for this. Would you like to be the owner then? If someone offered you to buy the
club if you had the money, I don't know, maybe you do. I don't know you that well. I know you're my
friend, but maybe you're hiding things from me. The question here is if you could buy the club,
would you buy Tottenham? If you would be asking of every other club, even if you name Real Madrid,
I would say definitely no. It's such a stressful work and everybody would hate you and you couldn't
go shopping. You couldn't go outside of your house to not be scorned by the fans. About Tottenham,
I would think it's true a little longer. You would think about it twice. All right, well,
that's fair. At this point, Ondra, I want to thank you for being part of the Footgris podcast.
Normally, I would tell my guests good luck. I'm sure you will understand that in this case,
I cannot do it. I will thank you. You're a Tottenham fan. I will thank you though,
because I do appreciate that you found time to record this podcast with me. I hope it's not the
last time. Thank you, man. I will wish you and your team good luck, because it's a polite thing to do.
It was sarcastic. All the best, Ondra. Take care. All the best to you, Zdeněk. Thank you for having
me. It was amazing. I can't wait to see you. If you want to have me next time, sometime, I'll be
happy to join you. We can do a follow-up when Tottenham win a game finally. Well, maybe next
year then. All right, sure. I don't mind. If I'm still around, sure. If we win a game next year,
then we can. Yeah. Okay. Okay, man. Take care. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye, Asali. Say bye to Zdeněk.
Bye, Kat.
Hello, welcome back to the language corner. As always in this part of the show, I will be explaining
the English language. Specifically, I'm going to look at some vocabulary related to making fun of
someone. Now, before I do that, I do have to apologize to you for the quality of the sound in
this episode. It's mainly my fault. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
It's mainly my fault because unfortunately, I wasn't careful enough to check my microphone and
it wasn't even plugged in. And my laptop default microphone was unfortunately
recording the podcast, which is not very good. And this only happens about once every two months,
way too often. But I hope you do forgive me. Now, as I promised, here's the vocabulary.
So at some point, I was talking about how I played with Ondřej for one team we played for
Verbová Lhota. And the fact that Ondra is a Tottenham fan while I'm an Arsenal fan. Tottenham
and Arsenal, as you guys probably know, are huge North London rivals. Their fans, the fans of these
two teams absolutely hate each other. So obviously sometimes there is a bit of teasing, a little bit
of joking around when you have two friends who support these two teams. So I said there was a
bit of back and forth between us, better bit of taking piss out of each other. So I use three
expressions which refer to making fun out of someone or to joking around. First of all,
if you say back and forth, this means basically an exchange of comments, a lively exchange of
comments or opinions or jokes between two or more people. And in this case, I spoke specifically
about banter. Banter is lighthearted teasing or playful conversation between people who are
comfortable with each other. So lighthearted, it wasn't like we were really very serious about
trying to hurt the other person. Not really, it's most very playful. It was lighthearted, as I said,
it was just banter. And also I use the expression to take the piss out of someone, which means to
make fun out of someone. And yeah, it's just to tease someone in a humorous way. There are other
expressions, for example, you can poke fun at someone, you can take the mickey out of someone,
or you can even pull someone's leg. And all of these things more or less mean to make fun
out of someone or make fun of someone. Okay, guys, so once again, apologies for the quality
of the recording in this episode. And I hope you liked Ondřej as a guest. If you did, make sure you
like this as a video on the TeachersDenik YouTube channel. Alternatively, you can, of course,
give a review to this podcast. If you do listen to it as an audio, make sure you give it a five star
rating on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all those applications that are used by all people that like
to listen to podcasts. Alright, I've been Zdenek, and thank you very much for listening to this
episode. I'll speak to you soon.