So I was wrong about jake. Really wrong. In episode 2, he seemed to be a genuine nice person, but in this episode... he’s younger than the other characters, but he seems to be the smartest. In episode 2 he only lied about his age, but here, something felt off. They didn’t show us exactly what was on the bottle and I have a feeling that jake said he would miss some of the penalties on purpose.

But I wonder how far he planned ahead. He clearly fixed the penalties so that he’d take the final penalty, but that was a lot of faith that they’d even get there. Which means he must have an extremely strategic mind. We saw in season 4 that Boggy was able to predict the score of a trial match and I have a feeling jake did a similar thing here. There’s no way he’d have taken a risk like letting Kelly stay in goal if he wasn’t sure that they’d get to penalties. He reminds me of Ryan from the dumping ground with his master manipulations.

Also, the return of dodgy Duncan. And boy was he back to his old ways. I mean, hiring someone to temporarily replace mike was a good idea, but he didn’t have to trick and lie to boggy about it. Especially when he pretended that he actually wanted to help mike. I actually thought he cared about mike, but I should’ve known better. I mean, he didn’t even let boggy tell him how he was and Dodgy Duncan asked! Damn Stormzy.

And the music really is a clever stylistic choice. Or the lack of it. Episodes 1 and 3 had barely any music which added to how bad the match was going, while IIRC episode 2’s training did have music.

It was nice to see Alba and Liam work together on the pitch too.