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Hello, all!
That’s assistant coach Lauren Smith at the top today.
Ramble of the Day
Generally, I am full of compliments for those creating video content for football teams. It’s a hard job, but at least the ones I pay attention to manage a solid amount of entertaining videos. If they’re not above average entertaining, they at least meet a base level of entertainment that you have very few complaints. I don’t know what happened for the England national team’s video folks to miss the mark on that level, because this really is not worth a watch.
For some reason, the people with decision making power here decided that inviting Harry Winks and Mason Mount to do a fruit bracket would be a good idea. For starters, a conversation about best fruits is saved for friends, when you can judge each other for choices. It’s one of those conversations that does not translate at all to entertainment for anyone who wasn’t there — if I told you my sister and I had a disagreement about grapes once, you would not find that interesting.
Winks, Mount, and the host are all very good sports during the whole thing, but they cannot inject life into this concept. It’s not even their faults — there’s nothing one could possibly do to make this more interesting. The only vaguely interesting about this video is that grapes made it to the final, which you can blame Mount for if you’re looking to blame.
The weird thing is, the England video team is only on its sixth bracket challenge video and they’ve picked more interesting topics for every one — best breed of dog, best Christmas song (there are two of these), best cuisine, and best cookies. They clearly hadn’t run out of topics yet, so this effort is extremely disappointing.
tl;dr: I think I found the most boring video content from a football team — Mason Mount and Harry Winks doing a best fruit bracket.
Stay informed, read this: Dan Murphy and John Barr on former US Olympic gymnastics coach John Geddert, who has been charged with 24 felonies and accused of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of athletes for ESPN
Links of the Day
Thierry Henry stepped down as CF Montréal’s coach as the COVID-19 pandemic would continue to keep him away from his family.
FIFA closed its bribery investigation against Franz Beckenbauer related to the organizing of the 2006 World Cup, citing the expiration of the statute of limitations.
A longer read: Musa Okwonga on Pelé, the new Netflix documentary about the Brazil legend, creating a legacy, and defending it for The Ringer