Hey everyone, welcome along to another Bite Size episode of the High Performance Podcast

and very soon the World Cup will be upon us. Are you excited, Damien?

Yeah, I was going to say I'm starting to get excited. I think it will be when the first thing

the game kicks off. I just can't feel it for many, many reasons. No, I don't think I'll be

watching to be honest, but what we are going to be doing is talking about World Cup experiences

on the podcast. In fact, we will share a short clip with you at the end of this with the

guest that Jonas on Monday, which will be cool, but we've had some really interesting footballers

and football people in the podcast, but we've also had some fascinating people that have worked in

the world of football. And often, Damien and I think people who come from a different world

and immerse themselves in football bringing cognitive diversity to that world are really

interesting. This is Pippa Grange. She's a psychologist. She's worked with the England team and,

you know, Damien, Gareth Southgate has said explicitly that she helped make a real difference,

right? Yeah. I remember working out it's 719 days between England getting

ignominiously to Iceland in the 2016 European Championships to then getting

beaten the semi-finals of the World Cup in 2018. And you can look at players that were added,

but the reality is there were 13 players that were involved in that day in Iceland to being

involved in against Croatia. So it's more important to say what was actually added and the answer

was Dr Pippa Grange who came into England in between that period and started to work on

relationships, trying to get the players to drop their mask, to be vulnerable, to start working

with greater cohesion. So when we got to speak through it was an absolute privilege.

And that's exactly what she talked about. It was a fascinating, wide-ranging interview on

live performance podcast. You can hear the whole interview, but here's a snippet exactly as

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