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You're listening to the Men in Blazers media network, Suboptimal Radio.

This is Roch, podding from the other side. The other side of the round of 16, that is a round in which I think now we've officially seen that our teams, those who did manage to make it through the group stages, without revealing their true strength.

Have now bared their fangs and displayed the qualities needed to survive, and thrive, and advance in World Cup every 8 knockout football.

The quarter final, Shiva and Quiver before us. And to help us reorient our overview of the tournament, Chief Soccer Correspondent of the New York Times, or to have expected goals my European night co-host.

Oh, it's Mr. Rory Smith. Hello, how you doing? Rory, you sound like Yorkshire Tom Waits. How is that through holding up as we approach the business end of World Cup 2020?

The thing is, it's been two and a half weeks of kind of bellowing out Argentinian fanchants, screaming at Brazilian goals.

Were you paid by the Caterian Government? Were you one of those Lebanese Ultras?

I was, yeah, Urgent, the brave host nation on. No, I think there's, the journalists are starting to feel the pace of the World Cup.

There's been quite a lot of bodes going around the media core. I think mine is more rooted in fatigue. I feel absolutely fine otherwise.

But my throat is a little bit scratchy, and I apologise if it sounds like, at some point during this podcast, I go through like an instantaneous puberty.

I don't know, I apologise for that. I've been going through an instantaneous puberty for the last 15 years, pod by pod, but I will say, you said something fascinating to me before we came on, that it is almost like a super strain of every world viral infection has been kind of congealed by the media together.

And God knows they've caught everything under the sun before they came and has created just a virus, which is wiping out journalists after journalists.

Yeah, I mean, I don't want to get too dramatic. I think there's, there's kind of two things. One is that, obviously there's, I think there's 15,000 journalists here.

And the way that this, the way one of the ways this World Cup is different to all the others is that there's just one kind of main media centre where lots of people tend to go for press conferences or to kind of pick up tickets or whatever you have to do.

And that is probably not an ideal mix from a viral point of view. And the other is that everything in Tatar is air conditioned.

And that there's a chance people will have read stories about it. You go outside and it's warm, you go inside, it's freezing.

The, you know, the metro is air conditioned, the stadiums are air conditioned, the press rooms are air conditioned, the restaurants are air conditioned.

I've been in a park today, the park itself is air conditioned. And apparently that I'm not, it's one of those great sentences.

I'm not an epidemiologist or a breathing expert. But apparently that change in temperature and humidity level messes with your throat a lot.

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