Ted Lasso Recap: Searching for Susan Boyle

Ted Lasso

Richmond’s Got Talent

Season 4 Episode 3

Editor’s Rating 4 stars ****

Ted and Alice bring in new recruits to help the team, but there are mounting issues off the pitch. Photo: Apple TV

“Curiouser and Curiouser!,” the second episode of Ted Lasso’s fourth season, eased viewers into Ted’s day with an Elton John song and a nice stroll to the stadium. Not so in “Richmond’s Got Talent,” which begins with an ear-piercing cry of “Fuuuuuck” as the Lady Greyhounds’ sole remaining striker learns she’s pregnant. This is, in Alice’s words, “a fucking disaster.” The first two episodes of this season served as a kind of warm-up, catching us up with Ted and introducing us to the new team, but that’s clearly over. We’re in the thick of it now.

Alice presents two ideas, one delivered without any enthusiasm, the other dropped as a joke. She knows a terrific striker named Gemma (Abbie Hern), but Gemma is in law school and, with no further explanation, Alice says she’d never play for Richmond anyway. The second idea is, haha, to have open tryouts. This, she believes, is a terrible idea. But Ted and Coach Beard don’t share that feeling and start rattling off stories of hidden talent like Good Will Hunting and Billy Elliott. When Alice offers up Susan Boyle as her example, only Beard gets the reference. “I have to look up your references; you have to look up mine,” she tells Ted when he asks for an explanation. That’s fair enough, especially since, as the rest of the episode proves, Boyle is pretty universally known in Great Britain. (In case you also need an explanation, watch this. It’s what’s bringing Ted to tears in a later scene.)

While this unfolds, Rebecca is trying to carve out some quality time with Matthijs via a quickie in her office that Ted has the bad timing to interrupt. It won’t be the last moment the couple’s plans get frustrated. Thinking Alice is enthusiastic about it, Rebecca signs off on the open-tryouts plan, but Keeley arrives before she and Matthijs can resume their reunion. She wants £4,000 for rally towels that Rebecca doesn’t want to give her, only to learn that Keeley has paid for them out of her own pocket. Keeley is all optimism in the buildup to the team’s first game — merely a friendly against Hayes and Yeading, but important nonetheless — but subsequent events threaten to squelch those good feelings.

Specifically, Higgins, Roy, Ted, Rebecca, and Keeley have to endure a team shareholders meeting; the shareholders are less than enthused about the women’s team. But first, Roy has to deliver a state-of-the-team address, which is, as Roy puts it, “concise as always”: “Two wins, one loss. We played like shit in all of them. We’ll see what happens.” Roy can’t escape one difficult question, however, concerning his plans for what’s next after his contract’s up at the end of the season. But if he has any, he’s not sharing that info.

When the time comes to discuss the women’s team, the crowd starts to disperse until Rebecca, in no uncertain terms, demands they stay. That doesn’t mean they have to be nice, however. When Keeley takes the stage, she’s greeted with catcalls and laughter, which might be preferable to the outright hostility she gets when she starts talking about the Lady Greyhounds. Even worse, some in the crowd have read the pessimistic “Higgins Report” that suggests the women’s team does not have a bright future, economically speaking, a report whose existence has been kept secret from Rebecca. She at least gets far enough to announce the team’s sponsor, Pinter & Sons, but even this might not be the good news it seems at first.

Is, as Dani Rojas famously proclaimed, football life? Maybe not, and we’ll get an alternative point of view from a character close to Dani later in the episode. It certainly can be consuming. For Rebecca, the business of football repeatedly gets in the way of dates she makes with Matthijs, starting with the one she sleeps through after the disastrous meeting. Football keeps Ted busy, but he’s having better luck carving out some time away from it. He’s able, for instance, to help Henry get ready for school — offering both a pro and a con argument for school uniforms in the process — then walks him there. In the process, they cross paths with Roy; his sister, Dr. Jenni O’Sullivan (Sofia Barclay)’ and his niece, Phoebe (Elodie Blomfield). They interrupt an exchange that suggests even Roy isn’t totally comfortable treating the women’s team as equals, much to Phoebe’s annoyance. Then Phoebe offers to help Henry out adjusting to his new school. (Her skills involve kicking boys in the balls, she notes.)

Shortly after, Rebecca gets the bad news that Pinter & Sons, spooked by the meeting, have pulled its sponsorship from the women’s team. Before she and Higgins can break this news to Keeley, assuming they plan to be honest about it, Keeley tells them she’s read the report and has latched on to an X factor not covered in the report: They have their teamwork and “the Richmond Way” on their side. Also, she’ll have to know everything from now on (a declaration that’s immediately put to the test when Rebecca spills the beans about Pinter & Sons). Rebecca swings into action by calling Pinter’s CEO, Elaine (Helen Schlesinger), the heir to the family business. When Elaine asks for an in-person meeting, Rebecca heads there immediately, despite Pinter’s offices being inconveniently located at Canary Wharf.

Once there, Rebecca’s attempts to charm Elaine fall flat. Elaine is concerned about the “animosity” toward the women’s team she’s witnessed, and when Rebecca notes that her company bankrolls wars, Elaine has an immediate rejoinder: “Wars are profitable.” With logic against her, Rebecca opts for an emotional appeal. She wants a world where women’s sports matter just as much as men’s, but she needs the help of sponsors who want that as well. And, despite her steely demeanor, Elaine is won over. Rebecca’s success, however, comes at the cost of missing a second date with Matthijs.

Maybe the tryouts will yield some good news? Eventually, yes, but first, the dozens of women who show up in hopes of making the team will have to be whittled down. Among the most promising is Lizzie (Faye Marsay), though Coach Beard doesn’t clock her as such immediately. That’s seemingly not because she arrives with a kid in tow, since he reveals that his mother was a bartender who used to describe shot glasses as “kids’ cups” when she brought him to work. But at this point, there’s nothing that makes her stand out from the crowd. One potential player does stand out, however: Maria Rojas (Paloma Cinco), Dani’s sister, who arrives buzzing with the same enthusiasm as her brother. Beard underlines her name three times.

Crossing other names off the list won’t be that hard, as Alice demonstrates when she asks the prospective players to run to the end of the field and back shortly after Ted tells them they’re looking to fill two slots on the roster. Subsequent drills eliminate even more candidates, but not Shannon (Shannon Hayes), a local Richmond soccer enthusiast whom Ted recognizes and greets by name. (He should, too: First credited simply as “Soccer Girl,” she’s popped up throughout the series since the first episode.) But the grueling process claims even Maria, who tells the coaches that, yes, her brother taught her everything she knows when it comes to cooking, photography, and software engineering. Football, however, is another story. Besides, “life is so much more than football,” she tells them.

So who will make the team? Not only does Lizzie demonstrate considerable skills, but she’s also able to defuse a confrontation between Niamh and Siobhan, an advantage that motherhood might have allowed her to pick up. Also, though not the striker the team needs, Beard sums her up as “by far the best player.” Then there’s Shannon, whose potential only Ted sees. A stunned, and quietly thrilled, Lizzie accepts the offer. This leaves Ted to break the bad news to Shannon. Except, despite Beard’s and Alice’s “no” vote, he welcomes her to the team. She’s thrilled, too, and not quiet about it at all.

They still need a striker, however, and Alice’s previous attempt to reach out to Gemma earned her the coldest of cold shoulders. Nonetheless, Ted suggests Alice try again with Ted by her side — even if it means disrupting Gemma’s law-school studies and annoying the other patrons of the library where she’s attempting to conduct them. Alice, Gemma reveals, is the reason she quit football in the first place, thanks to bad experiences playing beside her. She mostly remembers Alice because Alice would regularly call her a “lazy cow.” Why would she want to play for her? Alice storms off, leaving Ted to tell Gemma that Alice’s list of great strikers had only one name on it: hers. Later, while attempting to study, Gemma finds herself watching clips of soccer matches and daydreaming before deciding to take Ted and Alice up on their offer (but without leaving law school).

While this unfolds, Keeley faces her own crisis (at first from the vantage of her extremely pink and extremely Keeley-appropriate office) when June (Remi Shorunke-Samuel), a Richmond employee who considers Keeley her mentor, breaks the news that the kits for the match have not yet arrived. That’s a pretty big deal, but one she’s sure she can take on. But her frustration piles up as her efforts to track the package down repeatedly fail. All the while, Roy keeps putting his foot in his mouth every time he tries to offer words of encouragement, like noting that the match is “just a friendly.” Keeley’s problems draw in Rebecca, who spends time comforting her — which leads to Rebecca missing yet another date.

In the end, the package never arrives, but that turns out to be okay. Keeley has a nice conversation with a driver who recognizes her from her Vanity Fair profile, not her pinup days, and later she arrives at the unorthodox solution of creating homemade kits with the help of Phoebe and her classmates, a gesture that, for once, lands the way Roy wants it to. He continues his winning streak by handing Keeley his own report on women’s football: a pink binder with a sheet of paper reading “Fuck ’em.”

As for the game, well, it’s not that exciting. Richmond holds its own defensively but can’t get any offense going, at least until Gemma takes the field to deliver the game-winning goal. Also encouraging, Rebecca and Matthijs finally have their date (even if the waitstaff mistakes her for a sex worker Matthijs has hired to save face). And who else could sing over the credits but Susan Boyle, a reminder that sometimes taking chances leads to unlikely victories after all? Maybe this season will go well in the end.

Of course, it won’t be that simple. It’s nice to have an episode filled with manageable crises, but they’re also crises that point to bigger problems. Alice and Gemma really don’t seem to get along, and neither seems inclined to back down from their hostile postures. Lizzie’s parenthood, whatever advantages it gives her on the pitch, seems like it could create complications. Shannon remains raw despite Ted’s enthusiasm. Elaine came around, but she wasn’t wrong in thinking that the Lady Greyhounds would be a runaway sensation from the start. The team is playing to a smaller crowd and its matches are being streamed, not broadcast. There’s a long, tough road ahead, even after these triumphs.

Biscuits

• Why is Rebecca so frustrated about having to travel to Canary Wharf from Richmond? One of London’s business centers, Canary Wharf is located about 14 miles from Richmond. To get there would require Rebecca to spend about an hour on the Tube (hard to picture) or a little bit longer if she traveled by car.

• Rebecca Lowe and Jill Scott have some nice moments playing themselves as the announcers covering the match. We probably haven’t seen the last of them.

• “I love blunt people. They’re like those maps at shopping malls. You always know exactly where you stand.” Ted and Matthijs are weirdly compatible, aren’t they?

• When Keeley suggests Roy could help her if he had a time machine, she refers to the year as 2025, which indicates this season is in the near past (and will likely conclude, as the soccer season does, in May of this year).