The return of the Thumbs Up-Thumbs Down weekend review, featuring Gio Reyna scoring, managers admitting their mistakes, and Crystal Dunn being all-around incredible

**Taylor Rockwell** (0:20)
Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Total Soccer Show. My name is Taylor Rockwell, and we've got some weekend to review. Gio Reyna scored, and his reaction made me genuinely emotional, while Miggy Amoron reminded us that it's okay to sign players whose price tag is not extorsional. Awanyi scoring the winner and making himself the hero, Man United fans grateful for the presence of Casamiro, Napoli supporters Scudetto dreaming, LAFC post-Darby win beaming, and Leeds supporters about the perpetual fate screaming. Ryan and Joe are both otherwise occupied and out of town, so it's time to hand out some weekend thumbs up and thumbs down. Joining me to do so is a man who knows Jorginho is mighty at a pen. It's the one, the only Mr. Graham Ruthven. Hi, Graham.

**Graham Ruthven** (1:05)
Hi, Taylor Rockwell. That was a very good Ryan Bailey impersonation there with the rhyming. What did you rhyme Ruthven with at the end there? A pen, Jorginho pen, very good.

**Taylor Rockwell** (1:13)
Yeah, I'm running out of things. I don't know if you actually feel that way about a Jorginho pen. But I was running through the Ruthven rhyming catalog and came up with pen. The only one I could remember on the fly was Jorginho taking a pen.

**Graham Ruthven** (1:26)
So Jorginho's penalty routine just gives me stress, quite frankly. I find it a very stressful experience. It's the same with Joseph Martinez whenever he takes a penalty like that.

**Taylor Rockwell** (1:36)
Running the hop?

**Graham Ruthven** (1:37)
Yeah, just anxiety-inducing.

**Taylor Rockwell** (1:41)
I've heard people say this before. I think I feel the same way. Is it because of how horrifically that could go wrong? Because he's literally flying through the air right before he kicks it. Is that what it is?

**Graham Ruthven** (1:51)
Yeah, a little bit. It's because the standing foot isn't planted by the time he takes the kick. So it feels a little bit like a lucky dip where that ball could go anywhere, which I guess is maybe the theory behind it. Because if Jorginho doesn't or if I don't know where it's going, then the goalkeeper doesn't know where it's going either. But yeah, it's a stressful experience for me.

**Taylor Rockwell** (2:10)
So if I said you said Jorginho is mighty at a pen, should it be mostly mighty? Is it if I'm making this accurate? Because it really was just about the rhyme scheme. So too was me coming up with the word extorsional instead of extortionate. But whatever, it's fine.

**Graham Ruthven** (2:22)
Yeah, senselessly phenomenal with the pen. I'm not sure there's much logic behind it, but it seems to work. So keep doing what you're doing, Jorginho.

**Taylor Rockwell** (2:31)
If people have rhyming ideas for what I could rhyme roughen with that are PG-13 rated, I think that's what allows us to be clean on iTunes. But on today's episode, since it is just myself and Graham, we didn't want to do the full weekend review because that seemed like a lot of work. So we're going to go back to the classic format, the thumbs up, thumbs down. It lets us talk about some of the big games, but some of the big moments. But just in a who had a good weekend, who did well, who did bad, who gets a thumbs up, who gets a thumbs down. And Graham, there is, I should have reminded you, the opportunity to do thumbs medium, if you're not quite sure if it was good or bad. Does that all make sense to you?

**Graham Ruthven** (3:12)
Yeah, I mean, thumbs medium is pretty much my general rating of most things in life. I feel like today's show might be more of a weekend ramble than a weekend review.

**Taylor Rockwell** (3:20)
Oh, good chance.

**Graham Ruthven** (3:21)
Yeah, we're going to find out what happens when we don't have Ryan and Joe to give us some structure. This could get loosey-goosey.

**Taylor Rockwell** (3:27)
We've talked two games and it's been four and a half hours. We should probably call this one quits. Yeah, let's get to the weekend that was. We're going to spend a good amount of time in the Premier League, but let's start in the Bundesliga, Graham. Do you have some thumbs for a certain young American?

**Graham Ruthven** (3:42)
I do indeed. The biggest thumbs up of the weekend, straight off the bat, is Gio Reyna's goal for Bruce Adortman against Stuttgart. His first Bundesliga goal for 421 days.
If his goal was a thumbs up, his celebration was one of those great big novelty foam thumbs up you get at sporting events, because that was the best bit of this goal. The goal itself was very nice. Makuku spots Reyna and he's left inside the box. He's free on the left side inside the penalty area. He rolls the ball to him and Reyna just takes his time to guide a right-footed finish into the far corner of the net. So a very nice goal, but the celebration, he does a sort of knee slide with his arms up in the air and then he just falls over. So he's face first on the ground and you can just tell that that is all the frustration coming out of him. As I say, 421 days without a goal in the Bundesliga, all those injuries, all those dawns and stuttering recoveries. I don't want to jinx anything and my desk is wood so I'm touching wood right now so that I don't jinx anything but it feels like for the first time in 12 months that Gio Reyna is starting to build a little bit of momentum. He played 66 minutes in this match. That's the joint longest he's played in a match this season. He's now played 11 games since the start of September. Some of them, a lot of them, substitute appearances but nonetheless he's getting those minutes in his legs. The three games that he has started for Dortmund this season, in one of those matches he got two assists and then he scored in this match of course and then the third match was away to City so that's a difficult one. But did I say it? Is Gio Reyna finding form at the right time? Because it kind of feels like maybe he is.