Hello, and welcome to The Double Pivot, the world's most agreeable soccer podcast. I am Michael Kaylee. We are back. It's been another week of football in the Premier League.
We got a whole bunch of stuff to talk about. I haven't watched that much soccer. Sunday, I got myself a little bit of time, watched some of the games. That was good.
Saturday, I was on the bus to Allentown, Pennsylvania, and I was like bus captain. So I had a little bit of time, but I was pretty busy. And so I'm not 100% caught up on what happened in the games. But one thing that I am caught up on is the entire first season of the Netflix romantic comedy Nobody Wants This.
And so Mike and I were talking before the pod, like, okay, we've got some takes on this. We've got some takes on this in the Premier League. There's some interesting stories going on here, but we also need to podcast about Nobody Wants This on like a bone-deep level. And so we're going to see what happens.
We are going to talk Premier League. We're going to talk some matches. We're going to talk title. And if that peters out in time for us to just do Nobody Wants This as the main part of this podcast, we'll do that.
Otherwise, we'll have to pause it a little bit, maybe do a separate Nobody Wants This podcast. I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen. We're just straight talking here.
And I am joined by Mike Goodman. What does he want? I want this. Let's do this.
The music at the way as well. Please don't subscribe because Happy Podcast is featured on .com slash doublepivot. Come hang out in the Discord where the Double Pivot chat channel is peacefully divided about 50-50 between Soccer Breakdown and Nobody Wants This chat at the moment. So, you know, very faithful to the pod.
I appreciate it. Yeah, I think we're going to talk Premier League because we had Liverpool, Chelsea, and then also just, we've been pretty firm in our take that there was a big three and everybody else. And I think we're sort of ready to call it that we think that's maybe no longer the case. So where do we want to start with that?
I've actually like, let me start by dismissing Arsenal from interesting chat involving this because it's not interesting. The Arsenal portion of this is very simple. They've had three red cards already this season. Early red cards, all of them with over and a half hour left, two of them in the first half, which means that they've dropped a bunch of points and which means that their stats are skewed.
So to the extent that Arsenal doesn't look like what we thought they would, a lot of it is red card. But because that red card has led to dropped points, they are just mechanically pulled back from where they have been sort of separating themselves. Yeah, they're three points behind City, four points behind Liverpool, back on goal difference on both. Outside of the red cards, they've been more or less fantastic in the aggregate.
And so I think that like the Arsenal discussion, we'll have to pick up later. We have, it's just a smaller sample and it's a sample against mostly pretty bad teams because they keep getting red cards against the best teams they play. Like the shape of that discussion is like, can they be even better enough to make up the points against the teams they're behind, given what we think of the teams that they're behind, which is what we're getting to now. The easy thing that you would think here is you could look at the numbers and say, oh, there's some questions about City.
I can see it, but Liverpool have 21 points from eight matches. They've got, they've only conceded three goals and got a plus 12 goal difference best in the league. They've got almost a plus 10 expected goal difference again, best in the league. But there's, there's two sort of big issues with that top line.
One is that Liverpool have gotten two penalties and committed none. And so their non-penalty expected goal difference is a little bit worse than that. And then the second is they played by a solid margin, the weakest schedule in the Premier League, even after Chelsea home, they've played the softest schedule in the Premier League. And so they are going to have to be good against better teams.
So what, like relative to how good they've been against weaker teams, better than this. And the Chelsea game was not a game that suggested that like, they just have that next year and it's going to be easy. Yeah, I think there's some degree among soccer fans of this belief that like, there's a kind of good team that doesn't pile it on against bad teams. That like, there are teams that are like happy to just sort of take a 1-0 lead and sit on it more than, than other teams.
And the reality is that that's, that's just kind of not the case. And it's not the case for two reasons. One reason is when you play, even when you play a lot of bad teams, you will find yourself having fluky situations where you're either tied for a long time or behind, and you really have to turn it up to 11 to get your win. And the second thing is that even when you're winning, like it just doesn't really happen that teams don't, by dint of being good, continue to pile on stats.
There are teams that are like great defensive teams that win 1-0, but it's usually because they're not that great in attack. It's like Juventus this year, for example. Phenomenal defensive team, but they're not all that good an attacking team. And like, if you're not that good an attack and phenomenal defense, you're not a great team.
You're just a good team. And so if Liverpool are in fact great, we would have, I think, expected to see more attacking output at even strength against bad teams so far this season. Maybe it comes. Maybe like, you know, things happen.
Like, there are a lot of reasons you could argue that they will continue to improve on their stats, that there are fluky reasons why the attack didn't happen, that, you know, ebbs and flows of the season, whatever. Like, I don't want to write that off. But it is notable that they don't have more attacking output over this stretch if we're calling them sort of distinctly separated from the rest of the league. The other thing is like, they're top of the league right now.
They could just win the league without that. Like, that's entirely in play, right? Is like, especially given Arsenal's drop points, given City's issues, they just win the league. It's just notable that they haven't separated themselves when we take all of that into account.
It's quite possible this season that you don't have to be as good a team as we thought the big three were to win the league. If Arsenal just have some misfortune and City aren't that great, then, like, the best team of the rest, which could be Liverpool there, could just win the league. But I thought that the Chelsea match was pretty indicative of this because, you know, Liverpool were, I think, a little bit better, you know, once you take out the penalty, but like not a lot. And the shape of the match was very much that Liverpool were letting Chelsea have the ball.
Even before Liverpool were up, that was what was happening. Chelsea end up with 57% possession. Chelsea end up with, like, more than double the number of attacking third touches that Liverpool had. And the reason that this happened was that Liverpool did not try to engage their press against Chelsea when Chelsea tried to sucker it in.
Moresa's Chelsea, they play an interesting version of the sucker in the press ball that we've gotten so used to seeing from PostaCoglu, from DeZerbi, from Ten Hag. And they play a much more conservative version of it. They want to sucker in the press. When they can get that first pass through that press, they're very, very dangerous, and they create some very good attacking opportunities, doing that creating transition attacks from possession thing.
But if after that first pass, it isn't there, they're super happy to recycle it. If another team doesn't give them the press they're looking for, they'll just kick it around at the back. And that's what Chelsea did during this game a lot because Liverpool refused and refused and refused to come out and press them. And so Chelsea created a few chances.
You know, they've got Cole Palmer. That'll lead to some scoring chances. And they, but they just weren't able to get into the kind of transition situations they wanted to be in the vast majority of the time. Jackson's goal was that.
That was the one time they really got into transition out of possession. And you can see how dangerous it is, but Liverpool mostly didn't allow them to have that. And then Liverpool went over the top. Liverpool, especially from Trent, looked to go over the top.
And again, a good idea against Chelsea. It was reasonably effective. It was somewhat more effective than Chelsea attacking from settled possession. But it wasn't like so much better that they were dominating off the ball and that they were choosing not to have the ball, choosing not to play their chosen possession stuff.
Again, all of it looks like a team that is a little bit better at home doing enough to win rather than, okay, this is one of the big three against the best of the rest at home, and they're going to take it to them. Yeah, I mean, in effect, I don't think there was a lot of evidence in this match if your argument was Liverpool are great and they could be beating up on these littler teams by more, but they're choosing not to. And there's a lot of evidence for Chelsea being quite good, but not just Chelsea, this season. I think Tottenham as well have been quite good.
And so you system he was building or whatever, but when you have deep talent, it's one thing because you are selecting among other good-to-great players and just saying like, well, sorry, these other great players are better fits than you, but when the talent gets thinner, and, like, I'm not talking about, like, you know, we're running Rika Lewis out there, which is pretty fit, but, like, Foden, in theory, is significantly better than Doku and Sabino, even though those guys are guys you think are good players with promise for the future. And he's just not playing, and I don't get it. Yeah, like, like, the version of this team where Rodri and De Bruyne are out and they keep it together, to me, it's the version of this team where the thing everyone was telling me every time I was like, what the heck is City's plan for replacing De Bruyne? They were like, oh, Phil Foden's a 10.
Phil Foden's a 10. And then we watched the Euros, and it was like, Phil Foden's a 10. Phil Foden's a 10. And what you would do is that Phil Foden would be a 10, and you would pay play Bernardo Silva as a winger who supports in midfield to balance out the somewhat more attacking role that Foden is playing behind Haaland.
And it's not happening. And, like, to be clear, they've done this with Haaland and De Bruyne. This is not a reworking of a system. Large stretches of the last two years have been very much the Haaland and De Bruyne counterattack show.
Yep. And the balance comes from Bernardo Silva playing a very midfieldy, field-fillery winger. But, nope. Bernardo Silva is playing, like, the 10.
He has more attacking penalty area touches than anyone else on this team, including Haaland. Like, he's really playing this replacement for De Bruyne or Alvarez role, and he's not a replacement for them. It's one of the first times you've seen Silva put into a role, and it's like, oh, this works. To be fair, we went through, like, a similar thing to this last season, two seasons ago, where Silva played left back for, like, a month.
And then Pep was like, oh, never mind. So, maybe Silva playing as the 10 here will get a Pep, oh, never mind, and we'll move into whatever this becomes. But, yeah. I just, you keep expecting Pep to do something new.
Like, the whole thing this season with the lack of moves that they made over the offseason, and in particular, I mean, the thing that, like, you know, tipped me over to saying Arsenal are the favorites is getting rid of Alvarez and not replacing him. Like, that was crazy. And so the joke I was making was, like, Pep is asking the landlord to raise his rent. He wants his job to be harder, that has gotten too easy.
But if that's the case, like, do something, man! Yeah, so we'll see. Maybe they'll do something. Maybe they won't.
I think everybody wants them to do something. Everybody wants this. Except for Arsenal fans. Arsenal fans will tell you, nobody wants this.
Oh, boy. I finished the show, and I think the first thing I should say about the show, because we're gonna get deep into a lot of issues we have with the show, is that it is, like, there are two leads to this romantic comedy, Kristen Bell and Adam Brody, who I'm just gonna call Seth Culler over the course of this episode. It's just going to happen. And they are charming and funny.
Delightful. They are absolutely delightful. And they're two psychics. Zany and delightful.
Absolutely. And again, I'm just going to call them Willa and Jonah. And it's Willa from Succession and Jonah from Veep, and they are both really funny. Really good in this.
And the other important thing about this show is that while it is a Netflix 10-episode comedy, those episodes are 21 to 23 minutes long. They're tight. They are funny. They are edited.
It's like not the thing that you expect when you see it. It's actually like, it's trying to be funny. Funny and sexy are its two top goals, and it hits them. And all of that is really good.
I enjoyed watching this show. There is something novel about a show being made as a sitcom with a rom-com movie arc. Yes. Because that's clearly what this is, and you haven't really seen that a lot, I think, in this age of television.
So like, exactly. There are always, like, if you've got a rom-com movie arc, and you're doing episodic television on Netflix or something, it's just really, really sad. Or it's got some big thematic content. This one does have some big thematic content.
We're gonna get to that. But like, this is just trying to be a funny sitcom and do a romantic comedy arc. And I think it, like, more or less succeeds on both of those scales. Yeah, well, this is what I said to you, right?
It's like, I said, what I said, I was like, I watched it. It's delightful. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's absolutely terrible, but it's absolutely delightful. Okay, so I guess we should set the basic premise, right?
Yeah. So the basic premise is Seth Cullen is a rabbi. They don't ever specify his denomination. This is diagnostic.
Yes. And she is a relationship and sex blogger, podcaster. Podcaster. Podcaster.
You're already erasing our people, man. And they're both in LA. To be clear, there are going to be spoilers for the entire season in the rest of this episode. We are not going to not talk about the things that happen in the final two episodes because those are really important for, like, what's wrong with this show.
That is 100% correct. And I like, even... So, as we're talking about this, the two leads are incredibly charming. And the show knows that its bread and butter is these two leads being incredibly charming.
And so, to the extent that any of the, either of them are supposed to have flaws, and really only she is supposed to have flaws, they're also just sort of told to you and not shown. Like,Kristen Bell's character is supposed to, I think, be, like, edgy and self-sabotaging and, like, sort of self-centered and egotistical in, like, a very stereotypical way that you can understand sort of the, this mold of female lead being built. But her character is actually none of those things. Her character is somebody who, like, has already grown out of that, and you are seeing the good growth being evident.
Not somebody who is struggling with growing out of that. There are multiple episodes where it seems like she is going to sabotage the relationship. There is an episode where she gets an ick from seeing him be sort of, like, weird with her family and say some dumb stuff and wear some unattractive clothing, but then she gets over it because he does something charming. And there's an episode where she is supposed to start, like, sabotaging it by obsessing about his ex, and there's a box of her stuff, but she makes a good decision not to look in the box of stuff.
And then when she eventually does for, like, romantic comedy reasons, she apologizes and tells him about it immediately. And there was an opportunity here to create drama out of her that they chose not to do because they wanted to tell the story of her... I don't know why, but they chose not to create tension from a set of things that they set up to create tension, but each of them gets resolved in sitcom format within the episode. There's something similar going on with him, is the other thing.
And it's like, excuse me, it is really central to the question of his Judaism and his Jewishness here, which is that, like, the central tension of the show is, like, he's a rabbi, she's not Jewish, how is this gonna work? You know, similarly to these episodes where she might self-sabotage, there's one episode where he takes her to his childhood Jewish summer camp where he's now known as, quote-unquote, the hot rabbi, and he doesn't handle that very well, and it looks like he's self-sabotaging, but by the end, again, it's very nicely tied in a bow in 20 minutes and everybody's happy, and neither of them are, like, particularly shown to have done stuff unreasonably wrong. But part of what goes on in that episode, and part of where the tension comes from, is, spoiler plot, he's up for the job of head rabbi. And the question is posed to him, basically, like, can you be head rabbi if you are dating, involved with a non-Jewish woman?
Which, set aside for a moment that the answer to this question is obviously, yes, that's fine, given everything that they have shown about his brand, the brand of Judaism for which he is a rabbi. Like, he's not out there wearing a yarmulke in daily life. Like, he's a very secular individual in all ways he is shown. Which is fine!
Like, you could be a rabbi and be that! But part of the deal, then, is, like, nobody's really gonna blink if you're dating somebody who's not Jewish. He drives to a pickup basketball game. Yes.
On a Saturday in this show. On a Saturday! Yeah, like, my reform rabbi from my childhood officiated my wedding. My wedding was on a Saturday at 5 p.m., and he was just like, I've known It's nothing goes on with that story.
And it's just not handled at all. And I think that the thing that you see before that scene, which I was like, Oh, I do not like this. I do not like this. Is that from the beginning, the show is depicting a character who has no idea what Judaism is, and has never interacted with Jews in her life, and more to the point, has never interacted with Judaism in popular culture, which is utterly insane in LA in the 2020s.
Like, she asks what Shalom means. She doesn't know what... I mean, that's a pursuit that you could imagine someone being dumb, but like, that she would sort of... She doesn't know what Shalom means, and there's this whole thing with shiksa, like, people say shiksa in this show so much as if this is a perfectly normal thing to be saying.
But like, there was a Seinfeld episode about shiksas that all of the characters in this show absolutely would have watched. Like, it just doesn't make any sense sociologically. I will say that, like, bizarrely, this is a thing in pop culture. A few years ago, you know, Christmas movie season, and the Hallmark Channel does all these Christmas movies.
The Hallmark movie, the Hallmark Channel got dinged for not doing a Hanukkah movie. So then next year, they made a Hanukkah movie to go along with all of the Christmas movies. And in the Hanukkah movie, it's like, the Jewish person doesn't know what Christmas is. Like, what are all these weird Christmas traditions?
It's like, what do you think is happening here? And like, there are places in the country where there are very few Jewish people where you can grow up and live a life into adulthood without interacting with Jews. And maybe you just didn't work paying that much attention to pop culture. But like, that ain't LA.
Yeah. And like, look, I've been a lot of people's first Jew in my life. I really have. And it's like, it just, it just, even if you were one of those people, in this show, you would need to explain why.
Like, you could create a backstory about it, or whatever. But like, boy, ow. They don't. It's just like, insert whatever, you know, sort of like cultural mystery of a group you want.
And just make it Jewish in this case. And it's really bizarre in that way. Yeah. And it's also, like, a lot more concentrated among the women than among the men.
You know, his dad, who's played by the Greek from The Wire, which is fantastic. So many people you're recognizing that. There's a bunch of people you recognize. And there's a bunch of people that clearly Kristen Bell just went through her Rolodex.
She gets Ryan Hansen in for a scene. Like, it's great. But he's really supportive of his son. And, you know, like, you do what you need to do, but don't tell my wife, don't tell your mother that I said this.
And then his brother, again, playing like a version of Jonah from Veep, but that is, like, not a bad person. Just abrasive, is tremendous. But then his wife, they do try to humanize a little bit at the end. And they don't totally fail in that.
She's so awful in the first, like, six, seven episodes, it's hard to get back from it. And, as you said, the mother is just, like, she ends up being the primary conflict. But then, like, as you said, her commitment to Judaism as such is not well defined. In part because I think the show is unable to do that, unable to think through it, has not thought through it.
I think the bottom line when it comes to Judaism is that there is absolutely nothing beyond something like surface level of what Jews do. Like, it doesn't engage with it in any way. There's, like, like I said, you could sub out Judaism for Greek, and it would be the same. You could sub it out for Armenian, right?
Like, and it could be the same. There is no sort of even, like, cursory examination of the ways that, like, a specific Jewish subculture would influence things. Which is why you then have to have the Jewish mother go and, like, eat the prosciutto to signify these things, right? Like, it's, yeah.
Yeah, and, I mean, the show is written by, the showrunner is a woman who converted to Judaism to marry her husband. And it is hard not to read this as the hangups of someone who had some perhaps difficult interactions with Jewish women along the way. Like, it is just so striking how much this, the, like, difficult Jews of gender. That is a hundred percent true.
But also, I mean, this is, it is an unfair, it is an unexamined stereotype of what Jews are like in this way that is, I mean, it's negative to both sexes, but because they are so committed to making Adam Brody a fucking saint. Like an absolute saint in Nora's, the main touchstone of Judaism on the male side from any of the sort of easy negative stereotypes. And because Jonah is so, like, super generous, like, he's such a weirdo in a great comedic television way that there's nothing, like, Jewish, like, stereotyping about him, really. So you just kind of run out of male Jewish stereotype characters to put that stuff on anyway.
And then his, I'm pretty sure his father gets the most of it, but, like, is then sort of treated with a lot of kid gloves as well. There's, like, a big drama problem with this show where nobody, they won't let either of the two main characters actually do a wrong thing. Like, everybody knows that point in a rom-com about 70 minutes in where you get the feeling in the pit of your stomach because one of the two characters is about to be an asshole for the next 20 minutes. And this show won't let either of those characters do that.
And they really had it set up well that they could have and it would have worked. Either or, or both. Yeah. Yeah.
And I mean, they nearly do with him. Like, his not presenting to her the problem of conversion until super late in the show. Right. Like, which would works dramatically as him, like, being on a rebound, not being ready to, like, take risks with this relationship.
Like, that should have been a really, really big issue, but it couldn't let Seth Cohen. Like, the OC was more willing to let Seth Cohen be unpleasant than this show is. And, like, boy, the point before that where he's, like, hiding her at camp because the head rabbi is there and he doesn't want the head rabbi to know. Which, by the way, that becomes, like, sort of a non-issue, but he finds that anyway.
And it's just like, well, you got to deal with it if you're gonna be the head rabbi. So it's like, but okay. And then, like, she leaves and he follows her and then, like, tells her about the ritual of Shabbat candles and that solves everything for that problem. And I was like, man.
So we really haven't talked about the most important issue with this show. The podcasting! The representation of podcast Americans is problematic with a capital P. It's terrible.
I mean, there's just, there's a lack of interest in Judaism. There's a lack of interest in what goes on in terms of podcasts. In particular, audio production. Yes.
This is your bailiwick. I got to complain about the Judaism. You can complain about the audio production. So we see them podcasting in three times in the show, two different settings.
And one setting, it does look like a podcast. There are two microphones standing set up. They are sitting and they are talking. The microphones are way too close to each other.
They would each be picking up each other's audio track. But like, at least it kind of looks like it. And like, you don't want to, sure, you don't want to shoot a room that has enough space that the audio would actually work. Fine.
But then during the recording of the episode, their mother pops in and says stuff and they interact with her. And she's not mic'd up. I don't know whose microphone is picking that up. And it's not like, it's not like they interact with her in a way that they're gonna, like, cut it out of the podcast and go back to her.
It is content. It is clearly content. It would have been great content if she was mic'd up. And then they also, and then they also do a bunch of, they make a little joke, like, that they work, you can't see what's happening here.
Like, there's a whole bunch of visual stuff and people get really close to each other. But that's not the worst of it. That is not the worst of it. Because the other two times they're shown podcasting, they are sitting on a couch next to each other with handheld microphones.
And, like, they are moving around. So there's a whole bunch of fabric jostling happening. And then at one point, Kristin Bell says something and Willa responds to her, like, noting that she, like, sort of disagreeing, and she gestures with her microphone hand. She's, like, moving her microphone closer and further away from her as she's talking.
It's just like, you just don't care about my people at all, do you? Yeah, it's, uh... You know, plus the wish for them to be like, yeah, we're two podcasters in LA who are about to get a multi-million dollar deal to do something or other. Yeah