#a comedy!

[eloiscbridgerton]

HOUSE OF THE DRAGON 3.03 – Rhaenyra Triumphant

[brightmalcolm]

Doctor Whitly, why are you calling in, exactly? Because I want to help!

[sophsun1]

Interview With The Vampire – 1.05: A Vile Hunger For Your Hammering Heart

[kalinara]

I’ve been thinking about Ted and Coaching this season.  And I think maybe the structure of the show is such that we don’t give him enough credit for what he does right.

Setting Man City aside for a moment, because he did royally fuck up there.  (I think the entire coaching staff did, but as Head Coach/Manager, it ultimately falls on Ted.)

We don’t see all of the matches.  We have seen however that the scoreboard in the office has been changing.  The Ws have been increasing.  Heck, the fact that a Champion League team even made it to the FA Cup semifinal to begin with is, I’m told by people who actually have a clue about such things, a fairly big deal.

There’s a lot he doesn’t know about the sport.  Though I suspect at time, he plays up his ignorance for comedic effect, he still has significant blind spots.  But he’s smart enough to have a staff that makes up for his shortcomings.  

There’s a funny bit in the Honest Trailer for Ted Lasso, where they say something about Nate and Beard doing most of the work while Ted gets the credit.  And I admit, I kind of saw it that way too.  (With the caveat that as manager, Ted gets credit for choosing good people.)  But then we had “The Signal” and the match with Tottenham, and that made me rethink my read on the coaching dynamics.

Because when Ted leaves the field, everyone is at a complete loss.  The players are thrown.  The coaches are thrown.  Beard and Roy do NOT know what to do  until Nate does the unexpected and steps forward.  It’s only a few seconds in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a very revealing few seconds.

Because it tells us that, while he delegates the tactics to the others, Ted is still the one who makes the final call.  For every dramatically significant call like Roy’s “no, Jamie can make the shot”, there are a bunch of others that Ted makes (based on their input).  And they don’t have a backup plan for if Ted can’t do it.

Or if Ted won’t do it.  Which gets us to Man City.

Because I do think we can see exactly the moment that Ted dropped the ball.  It was when Beard was arguing strategy in one ear, and Nate was arguing strategy in the other.  And Ted...doesn’t make a call at all.  Instead he pulls away from both of them to shout some meaningless encouragement at the team instead.

There are other fuck ups that feed into this, of course: the fact that Nate alone ran the last training, the fact that Roy wasn’t present to break the stalemate, because presumably, he’d managed to piss the refs off himself earlier in the game.  (It was very funny to see Nate sent back there, where Roy is already sitting and probably had been for a while.  But not great on the coaching side.)

Ultimately though, these fuck ups come down to Ted.  As the manager, it’s his job to make sure that the most inexperienced coach is not left alone to run the last training before a big match.  (Roy and Ted had genuine emergencies, but what was Beard’s excuse?  And why wasn’t Ted asking about that?)  As manager, he needs to keep his more volatile coaches under control so they’re not getting red cards during a major match.  (Honestly, Ted gives Roy far too much leeway in general, and that’s a problem in its own right.)

This is notable because Ted is fucking up the part of the job that normally does very well.  He’s probably never going to be the most knowledgeable about the technical aspects of the game.  He’s probably never going to be able to see wins and losses in the same way that Beard and the others do.  But he can manage PEOPLE.

Except maybe now he can’t.  He’s been slipping for a while, but not enough that it’s substantially affected the success of the team.  Until now.

It says something that it took being unable to coach at Tottenham to finally force Ted to try to deal with his issues.  But Sharon isn’t a magical fix-it, and I’m a little worried about what Ted may do if he doesn’t think he can do his job anymore.

[theincrediblemoonchild]

joel “god i hope he comes home safely” beans is making me slightly lose my mind

[daphnemoon]

frasier + favorite sad/emotional moments