Hello and welcome to the Tifo football podcast. I'm Joe Devine and I'm delighted to be joined today by Seb Stafford Bloor.

Hello, Joe. And J.J. Ball the Bullet. Hi, JJ.

Hello, Joe. How's it going? Good. We've been here all day. We've been here all day. But it was a good day to be here all of because there were three games and actually we went out for one of them, didn't we? We had a fun time earlier. That was nice. Lots to get through today. Of course, England, Iran was the first game of the day. We just watched USA Wales, so we'll be talking about that too. And Netherlands, Senegal, that was the game

that we skipped out of the office for most of. So that was fun. A bit of a different,

a little bit of different scenery. And of course, a return of points of bad, where I don't want to

give any spoilers away, but I'm happier today than I was yesterday. Yeah, big spoiler, really, isn't it?

Yes, it is a big spoiler.

But I just said I didn't want to give any away.

Not that I wouldn't.

But listen, if you wouldn't want to give any away...

If you want spoilers...

That's so much better, isn't it?

If you want spoilers for football, not for football games, but if you want spoilers for sort of football news where you would ordinarily wait around in your home in the day and think, I'll find out about that news later. But you could find out about it earlier. It turned out not to be much better as I thought. You should visit Theathletic. Theathletic.com forward slash Tifo, theathletic.com forward slash Tifo, where you, I think there's a very special deal on at the moment. I believe you can get The Athletic for one pound a month for six months if you visit that link, which is very exciting, isn't it? And there's been an extraordinary number I would normally ingest in these parts most of the time, but I have to say I'm flawed by the quality of the pieces that have been released, World Cup-related, so far. And we're only on day two. So, you know, there's plenty more to come. Check it out. That's theathlethy.com forward slash Tifo. But for now, of course, I will leave you in the warm hands and the cool embrace of, um, you know, not as many people in stadiums as you would want.

Okay, beginning with England six to Iran. We'll get to the football shortly. But there were a couple of other issues to discuss first. And Sep, I'm going to start with you because I think in what was for me maybe the most moving moment of the World Cup game so far. The Iranian place did not sing the

national anthem. And I just wanted to ask you why that is significant. Right. So the full context

for this is best found in a James Montague article, which is published this morning by The Athletic.

And the crux of it is that it's been a controversy after the death of an Iranian woman in custody

earlier in the year, has been protests in Tehran, has been brutality, it's been deaths, it's been

further arrests. And one of the issues which has arisen is kind of the allyship and the

support of Iranian celebrities

including including professional footballers who some of the pressure groups as a group called

open stadiums which lobbies for the rights of women in domestic Iranian football stadiums,

...