The Boxpark backlash, unfinished Azteca business & the unluckiest World Cup score-avoider

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1:54Pachee! He's ran the goalkeeper, he's done it! Absolutely incredible! He launched himself six feet into the crowd and Kung Fu kicked a supporter who was eyewitness Without a shadow of an out giving him lip. Oh, I say. It's amazing. He does it tame and tame and tame again. Crank up the music. Charge a glass. This nation is going to dance all night. The big World Cup flag question. The Kane-iest finish in the history of Harry Kane. Geoff Shreves on rallying cries. Sean Dyche on Olympic 1500m gold medalists. The big box park backlash. Unfinished Azteca business. The most obscure way anyone has ever accidentally found out the result of a game they were trying to avoid the result for.

2:44Emil Heskey on broccoli. Football podcast theme tunes in Netflix sports comedies. And Chelsea pushed the envelope of club's statement capitalisation. Brought to your ears by Goalhanger Podcasts, this is Football Clichés.

3:00Hello everyone and welcome to Football Clichés. I'm Adam Hurry and this is the World Cup adjudication panel. Joining me, first of all, is David Walker. How are things? Things are good. Excellent. Alongside you is James Moore. How are you doing? Yeah, I'm very well, thank you. Let's kick things off with a question from you, actually, Dave. A question I have not seen addressed by anybody, not even in an athletic explainer. The question is, do you think each team has one flag that travels around or do they have separate flags at each stadium for all the teams? I'm really 50-50 on this. I must credit this question, actually.

3:32I did ask you this the other day when I was watching one of the games, But the first person that asked me this question was at the England-Panamar game. James, I'm sure you know him, Adam, probably too. Jamie Cutteridge asked me this question. Yeah, do they have one flag or do they have separate flags at each stadium? It would be mad. Surely it'd be mad if they only had one flag and it travelled around the country. But then... They don't need 48 at each stadium, of course. No, exactly. So I think that's doable logistically to have the right flags at the stadiums at all times. And once you know the pathway, you can kind of shift things around if you need to.

4:08Yeah, yeah. Once you know, you know, Congo on this one. There was only one flag and something happened to it in transit. Exactly. They'd be fucked. Famously good truckers, the US. If there's one thing they can do, can't do trains, but they can do trucks. They can truck shit. They're massive flags as well, though. That's heavy duty. We need to get FIFA on this. I know a guy. Maybe he can answer. Colin did speculate, though, that they're really expensive. and that maybe so that maybe means that they there isn't just you know loads of them lying around they probably do only have a few they love flags in america though don't they they've probably got loads of those knocking about yeah even for well maybe not for iran but for most of the others when we do our next live tour or something we can't put a venue they've only got a football ramble one massive football ramble flag in the middle that'll do it's fine it's fine right um let's start with england 2 democratic republic of congo 1 i found it a fascinating game i have to say um whilst being a kind of dna level pessimist james throughout the first half and much of the second i wasn't remotely worried for england i really thought that they would would turn it around i just i i thought it was it wasn't wave after wave but it was a fairly sort of continuous concerted spells of pressure that i thought would tell in the end yeah i don't think we were ever really in one of those days territory were we like they had they had chances you know there was a shot off the line the the penalty denied and whatever else but when you see like you see Wissa hit the post up the other end it just kind of felt like this is even enough for me to not be too pessimistic about it in a weird way I just didn't I didn't quite envisage England losing that game but I think we've we've sort of been conditioned to expect what happened now right if you go back to Euro 2024 it's kind of an extension of that being shit but you know final aside, just getting through.

5:52That's true, actually. It has happened quite a few times now. But there were ominous signs after just five and a half minutes when Alan Shearer on the BBC made the definitive call on DR Congo barely a minute before they opened the scoring. I think the results against Colombia and Portugal suggest that they are no-mugs and they know what they're doing. They know how they defend. We've hit the no-mugs sweet spot, haven't we, James? they were ripe for a no mugging and they got one yeah i mean i think yeah that is exactly right they defended in the least muggy way imaginable there was no kind of no risk taking no kind of over the top shenanigans it was all very kind of rugged and and sensible it didn't really feel like a kind of world cup knockout tie against that a team you would say were kind of pretty vast underdogs.

6:43It was kind of very much it felt far more even than that in a way that yeah it kind of felt more like a quarterfinal or something like that maybe against a sort of Austria or Switzerland. Okay. I think Wisser suits a no-mug team as well. It's been around the block. Yeah but like before his real hot streak at Brentford you know you could have, people would be like who's this? He's no-mug you know actually he's pretty good. Whisser's interesting because he kind of personified my surprising hubris about England's chances of prevailing against Congo. Because at 2-1, he stepped up for a free kick. And I was like, I'm not having Whisser on free kicks.

7:27He doesn't look like a free kick taker. And so it proved. He hit one like a Sunday League player would. He sort of bent it over the middle of the top of the goal. I thought, wow, that's just a rubbish free kick. Is he the best you've got? So there we go. I don't know where that courage came from. Perhaps it came from watching the England game in the esteemed company of the England pod listenership, Dave, at the Bull and Egret. Is it Egret or Egret? It's Egret. It is Egret. I looked it up. It's the Bull and Egret in Hoban. And I chatted for most of the evening to a pair of lads who were flying off to Mexico City the following morning.

8:05So their short term futures and fortunes hinged a lot on this game. and I feel good for them. Not that they would have had a good time anyway and they would have gone, but wow, what a pressure game to watch on that basis. Yeah, fair play. One of them showed me his phone halfway through with a message from his mum saying, is it going to be a bit of a damp squib now if England lose? But no worries. It's going to be a dry squib. Yeah. Okay. But a very stressful moment early in the second half, James, when there was a TV outage, which turned out to be the deflected Jude Bellingham cross that Lionel Mpazi had to claw away.

8:45It was nine seconds out of the action for us watching it. At that point, we didn't know if anybody else had been affected. Everyone turned around and blamed the person behind the bar for the outage for some reason. It quickly emerged that it was pretty much everybody who'd had that situation. But what are the chances of that happening for a very almost pivotal moment like that? It felt like an eternity for the pictures to come back. Yeah, and it was just long enough to kind of like reach for the phone, get the phone out, load up Twitter, refresh it a couple of times to see the first tweet appear at the top of the feed, kind of implying something had gone wrong before the picture came back.

9:21But I mean, you say that, but that infamous ITV FA Cup game, and you'll know better than me, who was Everton and Liverpool. Everton against Liverpool? That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, they managed to miss the only goal of the game in a similar circumstance. So it does happen. On the Congolese goalkeeper, Lila Lampasi, this came from Nick Stafford. Here's the BBC Five Live co-commentator, Paul Robinson, once of England goalkeeping fame, on the DRC goalkeeper. He's not afraid to come off his line. Lampasi, we've seen the DR Congo goalkeeper makes decisive decisions. 31 years of age now, playing his football in Le Havre, in League Un or One, as we say.

9:59But don't show off, Paul Robinson! I can't work out if he's showing off there, Dave, or he's dismissing the idea that we should call it Ligue 1. We definitely don't call it Ligue 1. Sky bet Ligue 2. This current kind of hotbed of ex-goalkeeper co-commentators, they are really tickling me in a moment. I think they're all on the top of their game. I didn't expect this much from Paul Robinson out of all of them, but Rob Green and Joe Hart, we talked about it before, but I am fascinated by this current crop. But yes, despite Lionel Mpazi's heroics, semi-heroics, James, in the Congolese goal, it wasn't really Tim Howard at World Cup 2014, was it, really?

10:44No, not quite. I mean, I think he's probably still been denied, you know, like a lifetime of Paddy Power adverts every two years by those two Harry Kane goals. It kind of feels like he could have just about placed himself in that kind of stratosphere of international tournament banter characters. Sorry, Lionel Lampasi, not really the World Cup to try and be the cult goalkeeper, is it really? That is true. Despite his exertions in the Congolese goal, Dave, I maintained to those around me that England were going to score and it was going to be fine one way or the other. And at that point, well, I almost, you know, unironically recited Josephine's Southgate that you keep seeing in the trailer.

11:26and I really wanted to go, keep going, keep believing. Like a hungover Keir Starmer. Do you think people would have clocked it if you shouted that out in the pub? I think it's omnipresent, that refrain now. Keep going, keep believing. There's something really tense about it. I don't know why. The accent's okay, James. It's just the energy behind it is so odd. It is a very South Gating energy though, isn't it? That is the key bit of the, I mean, he wouldn't like to call it an impression, I don't imagine. But of the performance, it does have that weird kind of Southgate undercurrent to it. I'm not sure you'd have got understudy duties, to be honest, during the stage run.

12:10I've got Carsley, I'd have had Carsley. Maybe they'll do a little bonus episode for him. So on the moment where England did indeed turn it right around, Harry Kane doing what Harry Kane does. For all the talk, James, of Harry Kane involving his game and dropping deep and all that sort of stuff, this is really what Kane is all about. And it's one of the most satisfying and unifying feelings in football, which is getting the ball out of your feet and leathering it. And he's so good at it. And you just got the sense. I'm not saying I thought he was going to score at that moment, but he got the ball out of his feet so nicely.

12:44It was absolutely there to be hit. And the angle was just right to absolutely larrap it as well. it was really cany that goal uh yeah you could tell from the second he picked the ball up from gordon that like that that was the only thing he was going to do and i mean obviously i've watched him play many many times and seen him score a lot of goals from like 25 30 yards yeah like with that kind of trajectory i mean it is i'd say his trademark is probably more the one pulled into the near post off the left right i mean that kind of strike he still kind of pulled through that right and hit it back towards the goal this might be a weird thing to say but for some reason that goal just it evokes lockdown football for me i can just imagine him scoring that in an empty stadium for spurs in that in that 21 season yeah yeah yeah it's just a lovely goal to watch from pretty much every angle but um james you've done some statistical research on this and to to a certain extent it was written in the stars this goal well i don't you say that but i'm not entirely sure so i i having seen the the archon guy starting 11 before the game right i do consider myself to be a bit of a Harry Kane statistician as you know and looking at the back four they're all kind of current or former Premier League players I suspected what about it was like it was like getting some stickers I don't want to go Barclaysman about this but it really was a very yeah yeah so Masuaki Tuanzabi Chancellor Mbemba and Aaron Wan-Bissaka and my instinct was that Harry Kane would have absolutely tortured all four of those.

14:15And actually the reality was he'd only scored 10 in 21, I think it was, which I mean isn't terrible, but it was not good enough to tweet or bad enough to tweet. So I did waste my time in investing it in there. Were any of them on the pitch at the same time for the same team? I'm presuming not. I don't think so. Okay, because I didn't know if that would muddy your stats. I don't know how you do double count. I don't, you know, but yeah, okay. Can Zabie and Wan-Bissaka ever play together for United? Probably not. I don't think so. And I don't think Masuaku and Wampasaka were West Ham either. One in two though, Dave.

14:46That's a good record, as we all know, as history in football was to us. Needed a Leicester defender in there to pad the numbers. Exactly right. He just loves playing against Arthur Masuaku and all the rest of us. A lot of cultural overspill from this game. I think my favourite little ripple from this game, Dave, was Geoff Shreves getting entangled in a fascinating, very cliché-y argument with a journalist about whether Harry Kane addressing the England team after the game, where he stood in the middle of the circle, whether it was a rallying cry or a dressing down. I mean, they are fundamentally different.

15:22So I believe that the argument had a right to take place. Where do you stand on this? I'm with Shreezy all day. It's much more likely to be a rallying cry than a dressing down, isn't it? Surely. Yeah, you don't do a public dressing down as a captain, do you? He's not doing a Phil Brown, is he? Yeah, I did see a waggly finger, so you're right. Is that going to be the celebration we see in Azteca? Jeff Shreves. Oh dear, it was great. Let's get some more proper football man verdicts. This came from Sean Dyche. Firstly, buzzing for England. Well done. Congrats for getting through. Buzzing for the fans.

16:00Everyone involved. Let's have it right. That's a really tough watch again in my opinion didn't play with the tempo needed especially in the first 20 minutes didn't ask enough questions wrong team choices kip kano at the end of the day pulls us right out the bag kip kano did he call him kip kano as in kip chogi kano the retired kenyan track and field athlete what's going on there someone's gonna someone's obviously gonna come up with a rational explanation for this but has he gone for kip kano the uh 1500 meter gold medalist at the 1968 Mexico Olympics. No, almost certainly not. Why not? Why would we be pulling that reference out?

16:38I don't know. That feels like something Sean Dyche would do. Obviously, Harry Kane is not known as Kip Kano to anybody. He's just, the name's gone into his head and he's come up with a nickname off the top of his head for no reason and called him Kip Kano. It's mad to think that Sean Dyche, at some stage in the last few years, like maybe even before Tukul was appointed, was probably third on the list of English managers or someone. It's kind of like this generation's allardyce. Probably not that far away from being the England manager at some point. Oh, God, yeah. I wonder how far... With all due respect to Sean Dice, James, how far would English football have to fall for him to be drafted in as England manager?

17:21For the last 10 years or so, English football has been at a relatively high level, high level or at least since since guitar how far would what would have to happen kane retire obviously so we've got no strikers left bellingham sort of storm out and retire from international football and a half or something like that pickford to retire no keepers we'd have to we'd have to really start struggling for for him to have to come in and sort it out yeah it does feel like they have to lose a lot of those like technical attacking players so to be fair obviously chithfield hasn't actually picked them so it's less about who's available it's more about at the moment since he's retired from management and gone into the breakfast reviewing world, he's miles off it.

17:59But all it would have taken is him to be performing reasonably well in the Premier League and be the right person at the right time when we needed to pivot from the previous strategy. So if Tuchel absolutely bombs in this tournament, we'll probably go for an English manager next time. Yeah. and it'll probably be Eddie Howe or someone at the moment because he's the highest ranked English manager. But if Dyche was, let's say he was still Everton and had done well enough there, he'd have been in the mix. It could potentially happen. I mean, if we want a manager to play Premier League football with the England team and the Premier League continues to kind of deteriorate to set pieces and big blokes and whatever else, then actually he could kind of play himself back into fashion.

18:47yeah do you think he could do like the ad boothroyd stewart pierce thing of like you know kind of giving up a bit on being a club manager but somehow ending up the england under 21 manager it's a good route yeah there's a lot of kudos of being the other 21 manager and getting the top job but yeah it remains to be seen however i do think with his recent social media activity i think i think he's too far towards the end of the spectrum to be he'll take up the steve mclaren role when England lost against Iceland. He's going to be on Sky Sports News for a pivotal England loss rather than be in the dugout for it.

19:19And I don't think there's any way back now. I think the dial has swung too far in that direction. But that's something to aspire to, right? I think so, yeah. I did see you asking who was sat in that particular seat yesterday. Yeah, they don't tweet the clips out anymore. It's really annoying. Be proud of it, Sky Sports News. Stand by your journalism. Annoying. It's a very Stephen Warnock role, that, isn't it? But I guess he's at the World Cup or doing He's moved up and beyond. Someone said Lee Hendry, which I think is a superb shout. Sue Smith. Sue Smith, solid operator in the Sky Sports News Studio.

19:48Can do it solo as well, as I've seen before. I might be a tournament or two too late for this, Dave, but I've noticed a big box park backlash this summer. It doesn't feel like the place to be box park anymore. No, I think it's been out. It's been outshone as well by like the scenes from that massive statue thing in Mexico City, whatever it was. You know the one I mean, don't you? You see, like, when Mexico won the other night, there was, like, overhead shots of this, like, hundreds of thousands of people around this huge square thing in Mexico. It has got a name. I can't remember it. And there's been similar scenes in other countries, just doing it a bit better, like, just a bit classier than the box park.

20:31We don't need to see the food trucks in the background, you know, the pop-up food trucks. actually speaking of backgrounds when I was watching Germany lose on penalties to Paraguay James we said on this podcast before about how slightly and deliciously tin pot USA 94 was well there's still echoes of that because in the background of the penalties for Germany Paraguay you could see outside the stadium yeah you could see people like walking the dog outside horrible if you looked right onto the horizon you could see people with a dog there were trees allowed this to happen there were trees inside the stadium it's like a row of it was like Wimbledon it's like a row of shrubbery it's disgusting behind the goal when they did the coin toss the referee should have gone no not there mate sorry come on down the other end tv the um speaking of box park backlash actually and and you know failed proper football man english managers i think i'm pretty sure sam allardyce was djing at the box park before england panama to nobody as well there was nobody there the whole thing was really eerie and weird he looked like he was quite enjoying it he pulled off the look of it you know the body language is okay obviously everything else about it was utterly ludicrous.

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23:37Next up, though, England play Mexico in Mexico City. Now, the conditions are going to be tricky. I'm not talking about the altitude, Dave. I'm talking about it being 1am on a Monday morning in the UK. It's doable. It's doable. I might have to have a little kip beforehand, a kip kano beforehand, and then get back. That is, yeah, it'll be interesting to see what strategy people adopt, because this is sort of the only thing I can think of that's similar, a lot of people may have watched the Super Bowl at that sort of time on a Sunday night slash Monday morning. I'll have to get the snacks in there, won't I?

24:09I'll have to get the snacks in now if it's going to be like the Super Bowl. James, is this an absolute textbook returning to the scene of for England? I think it might be, yeah. It does just have all of the elements of it. It seems to have come at the exact point of everyone getting on board with this team in this tournament. Like 40 years on, it's such a round number that's kind of perfect, isn't it, really? And that kind of slight inconvenience for us watching here in the UK almost adds to it, I think. The fact that it's taking us out of our comfort zone that little bit. I don't know, it just makes it feel a little bit more exotic.

24:46But it's not the same, though, is it? I mean, obviously, it is literally the same stadium. It's 40 years and all that. But it doesn't look the same. It's not the same scene. It sort of, I mean, the opening game blew me away by just how beautiful it looked on TV. And it didn't look unlike 1986, I have to say. But I can't really do the maths on this, nor the meteorology. Is it going to be dark-ish in Mexico City when it kicks off? It was dark the other night for their game, and I'm assuming it's the same kick-off time because I was awake to watch it. Well, the other night was 3am, kicked off at 3am.

25:20It was supposed to kick off at 2am UK time, but got delayed for an hour and it was 3am. So there's probably not much in it. I don't want the Azteca in the dark. But then at the same time, it's cool enough, actually. I think the sun could be out. But I want England playing in the Azteca in the daylight. That's where the vengeance will happen. Because, Dave, this is unfinished business with a stadium, isn't it? I guess so. Yeah. Yeah. But the fact that it was different, obviously, Argentina in 86 with the hand of God, it's sort of, again, it's not perfect, is it? If we'd been beaten by Mexico in the Azteca at some point in the past, then it would be more of an apt returning to the scene, I think.

25:57England have had some fortune at the Azteca, James. England beat Germany 3-0 in 1985 at the Azteca. Kerry Dixon scored twice. Wow. Gary Lineker hauled off on the hour mark for John Barnes. Confed Cup. It was a bit like Le Tour Noir, but for Mexico in 1985. A little warm-up. But we did lose to the Mexicans at the Azteca a few days before that. So there may be trouble ahead. What is the altitude equivalent of wilting, Dave? Can we wilt altitude? Gasping. Yeah, gasping, surely. Gasped. Suffocated. No, that's bad. That's kind of that. But yeah, do we fear for them? I mean, I've seen a lot of sort of...

26:42I don't know if this is like climate change denial, James, but I've seen a lot of people sort of dismissing altitude as not a thing. Well, I don't want to out one of our athletic colleagues as having struggled with the altitude. in Mexico City, but I'm going to. Jack Lang, and I know who will listen to this, I hope he doesn't mind me saying, he really did struggle the first few days he was there. He's been out there, I think, now, what, like three weeks? Yeah. Struggled in what sense? Too high. It's too high. Everything's too high. Was he struggling to get his words out in the mix? He had to go down to the ground floor of the hotel to get a breath.

27:14Yeah, he had, what was he had? Yeah, he had some headaches, that sort of stuff. He is a whinger, though. I'm happy to be on record to say. I hope you're listening, Jack. Same for all the other journalists, though isn't it that's yeah he's had long enough to acclimatise by now he's still bloody there right but just to contextualise the altitude in Mexico City and the Azteca in particular Dave it's 14 times higher than the Hawthorns does that help you out yeah yeah that's nice is it hard to play at the Hawthorns it's 551 feet I think that's probably alright isn't it quick James calculate how many goals the squad scored at the Hawthorns come back to us yeah yeah If you could do it per layer above sea level, that'd be great.

27:56The clickbait phenomenon continues though, James. The disgraceful one the other day of you can still watch England for free even though it's on the BBC. Yes, it's on ITV. How about this one? The Mirror said, England forced to play extra game at World Cup after FIFA decision. It's just the World Cup being expanded to 48 teams. Yeah, that does strike me. That feels quite un-Mirror. That feels more kind of like express maybe, you know, dastardly foreigners trying to sneak out to try and trick our poor boys into playing an extra game against their will rather than you know the beauty of it dave is that it makes it sound like it was sort of decided at the last minute right that's it more of you please yeah this has been a laugh let's have another one yeah and you're going to play at altitude as well oh dear oh well yeah anyway you got to get your clicks somehow um this is interesting this is from the other day As the ITV studio team reflected on England's win over Panama, Ben Brindle asks, what's the background music all about here?