Hey,le cheaters, welcome on the always cheating podcast. My name is Josh. I'm here with Brandon. Brandon, how are you?

I'm great, Josh. Today we're talking about defenders and goalkeepers. But first, we actually went out into the world and did in real life scouting.

We saw Brighton take on Newcastle at Red Bull Arena in Harrison, New Jersey.

Remind me to never take the path drain to New Jersey again.

So I guess before we get into our defender and goalkeeper preview, what did we learn?

Did we learn anything?

Did we learn that popcorn chicken is really the scran to get at Red Bull Arena? I like this. We're just jumping right into it. Well, this is the third pod you and I have done in six and a half days. So I think we're pretty, our voices are pretty like settled in at this point. Yeah, I think that we, well, first of all, all preseason content, everything you watch, everything you see in real life, you know, in person, it all has to be to everything you're like kind of like, you know, match reports that you read about. All of us be taken with a grain of salt because we're not dealing with full strength squads on both sides. Often managers are trying different things out. Aston Villa today are playing with a three at the back system, right, which Emory had hinted at

going into the summer. And so we're seeing lots of things are sort of getting tried out.

So, and in fact, the match that we went to was a, was a two-one Newcastle victory. And if you saw

that, you'd think, oh, okay, so Newcastle handled them. But in fact, those two goals came in the

final five minutes of the match.

And what you and I saw was a dominant, honestly, Brighton performance. Now, granted, it wasn't

against a full strength, Newcastle. Neither side was totally full strength. But Brighton had a number of

starters out there. They had Matoma was out there. Danny Wellback. I think we can reasonably

call a starter. He's certainly in the starting rotation. And Estuponon was out there. The new

goalkeeper was out there. So just a lot of interesting parts. And I thought it was clicking

incredibly well. I mean,

Deserby is just a genius. I'm just so impressed with him and what he's done with that squad.

It seems like Deserby's training sessions must be the most efficient and effective training

sessions in the Premier League right now because while it was a mixed squad of Brighton and

Newcastle with starters and non-starters,

Brighton just as a team was cutting Newcastle up on the flanks through the middle of the park

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