Hi, I'm Grant Wall, and welcome to the Planet Football Podcast.

In this episode, Brian Strauss joins me to talk about this week's start of the English

Premier League season, as well as our thoughts on the MLS All-Star game.

The quick reminder, please rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast.

It helps people find us.

Oddward!

Let's bring in Brian Strauss from Washington, D.C. First off, Brian, we're recording this on Monday. Happy birthday, my friend.

Thank you. I'm working on this is only the second time in my life I've done any work of any kind on my birthday.

I'm sorry about this we're sort of violating your streak here.

Well I mean the streak was broken. The streak was broken in 2012 by the US women when they played that ridiculous Olympic

semifinal against Canada that ended like 1817 and 6 overtime or whatever that was.

For 3, Alex Morgan deep into extra time.

And so that was the year before I joined Sports Illustrated. I was at Sporting News and my editor sort of called me in a panic and said, look, I know that's your birthday, but we need you to write on this. This is big.

So I did. And that sort of broke the it was like the scene in life of Brian where you know

Breaks as a bow of silence because someone steps on his flip or something like that. So a very lengthy streak of refusing to cater to the man on

my birthday was broken and so yeah so this just breaks like a four year, five year streak.

And to be honest, I have nothing to do today anyway.

Nothing.

You may be the only person I speak to today, you and all of our listeners but that's my situation I took

a Valium to get myself ready for this so let's go. By the way, just so many things happened in that Olympic semi-final in 2012 where you had, I'm sure you remember this, this was Canada leading the US women three separate times,

the US women coming back three separate times.

That was the one with the goalie, with the six second goalie count thing, was that the game? That was when Abby Wamback starts counting like pulling her hand up to the referee and counting how many seconds the Canadian goalkeeper is taking before a goal kick and then comes

...