#points at coach beard

[leona-florianova]

Coach Beard

[ridingtedlassosjetskimustache]

[pineappical]

someone take this man off my hands

[jamietwat]

Roy: Alright, you win. You got what you wanted.

Ted: I’m a little lost. What exactly are we talking about?

Roy: I’m dating Jamie now.

Ted: That’s great! I’m happy for y’all. But I don’t remember sayi-

Roy: You told me to be mature and get along with him. I am.

Ted: [looks to Beard for help]

Beard: [pretends he’s absorbed in the book he’s reading even though he’s blatantly listening in so that he won’t have to be the one to respond to that]

Ted, clearly going for a joke: I’m glad. But you do realize I didn’t tell you you had to date him, right? It is possible to get along with someone without dating them.

Roy, dead serious: This is your fault. You did this to me.

Ted: I’m a little confused. When you say it’s my fault, are you saying that to blame me like it’s a bad thing or to thank me because you’re happy with him?

Roy: Yes.

Beard: [shoots Ted a confused look]

Ted: Which one?

Roy: Both.

[mitskijamie]

[trentcrimminallybeautiful]

im really just. obsessed with the idea of ted and beard's pre-series early friendship. like. from the immediate aftermath of their little les mis tale (how ted might have felt upon realizing what happened, how beard felt when ted showed up and lied for him anyway, what happened literally immediately afterwards, when they were finally alone--does beard confront him, demand in that sort of trying-to-sound-angry-but-it's-just-cracked-and-distressed-and-disbelieving raised high pitched voice why did you do that? i did it, i stole from you, or does he just. sit there, in silence with him, and then quietly apologize? or is it ted that breaks the silence?) to like. beard sticking with him and continuing to get to know him deciding he's giving this man his loyalty forever, and then beard getting to know him properly, seeing the less-than-perfect sides of him, seeing him get irritated or angry or maudlin, helping him when he's at his lowest, too, and while beard still feels deep down like he owes ted--ted, who gave him a chance and gave him love when he had no one and nothing--he now knows him as a full and multi-faceted person, they've helped each other in equal measure and love each other in equal measure and know each other in equal measure. beard willingly opens up and shares--even with his mysteriousness--and ted, too, actually lets himself be at least somewhat vulnerable, moreso than he had with anyone else. beard doesn't think ted's "too much", ted doesn't find beard's beardness offputting. it's not perfect--ted still has a hell of a lot of repression and problems of his own (although beard is no longer blind to them) and beard has issues, too; they don't share everything or have a perfect friendship, but god is it a strong one. and by the time we meet them, they're so in sync and they support each other and know each other better than anyone else.

[queen-mabs-revenge]

go girl give him nothing!

[after-the-end-times]

A gifset idea:

the parallel between ted and beard not stepping in with the team bullying nate so that roy steps up as captain vs ted and beard not forcing jamie to switch with someone during training

at first it seems like they're not taking into account how much jamie's grown over the years, but then ted and beard shared that same "he's gonna be so mad once we've won him over" look they had in season 1 with roy. jamie may be annoyed by their hands-off attutude, but their shared look says they know what they're doing

then ted could hear jamie wanting to educate the team on how to actually do total football while the team's yelling at him to just do what he's always done, so ted settles them with a story allowing jamie an opportunity to speak up

[coachbeards]

again reminding everyone of this scene and the facial + emotional journey beard goes through. wants to beat up his own friends for ted, ted holds up his hand and basically goes "down boy" and beard Looks at him before resigning himself to it like :/// fine coach :////

[asteria-argo]

are we going to see more of beard being a weird wise wizard, that poor pumpkin pie jamie cannot understand for the life of him but ultimately excepts and also (mostly) appreciates the small gestures and kind (kind of) things he does?

i could have just read the one scene of him last chapter utterly wrong in TATBP but i’m kind of hooked on the fact that beard is secretly a better person than everyone else.

(TAKE NATES RETURN FOR EXAMPLE!!! he acknowledged the hurt nate caused to the team especially colin and his bff for lifer theodore and held his own, it pisses me off that he doesn’t get the acknowledgment and recognition he deserves in life. like this man is a #lover AND a #fighter idec i love him)

this actually ended up just being a love letter to beard and a general rant (i could go on about nate’s return for dayssss especially in comparison to jamie but dear lord don’t get me started on that.) so my apologies PAHA

I don't know about weird wise wizard or Jamie being a poor pumpkin pie seeing as he's a 28 year old man with a house and a job and a mortgage in tatbp, but I do plan on Beard being a voice of reason among the coaches.

Ted and Roy both have very strong reactions to meeting Jamie again, while Beard while not unbias himself has a bit more distance from it all just from a personal stand point, so he gets to chime in when people are being unfair.

A fun thing about tatbp is that character development for almost everybody has occurred over the last five years between Jamie quitting and the events of the story, which extends beyond the show as well because the show only spans around three years and with characters like Beard I get to show case it through how they respond to situations in pretty subtle ways.

In canon, especially in season one, it's pretty rare for Beard to speak out against Ted's decisions despite the fact Beard's opinion is something that Ted holds in high regard and will listen too, even when they have very obvious differing opinions.

I've got my personal headcanons about Beards almost blind loyalty to Ted and how I think that affects his self worth taking their history with each other into account, and I like to think that over the last five years, he's grown a lot from that and is more willing to speak out when Ted is going a bit overboard or approaching things in a way that Beard doesn't agree with since in my mind after five years, they are very firmly partners who are equals, not the main character and quirky sidekick.

what can I say, I like it when characters grow in nuanced and sometimes subtle ways, and Beard is not an exception!

[lunar-years]

I am in 100% agreement on your "unpopular opinion" about Ted and Jamie. The panic attacks made it seem like there is some connection between Ted Witnessing Bad Fathering from James and it making him feel shit about his own dad and also about how he parents Henry, but none of that extends to Ted and Jamie actually having a father/son dynamic or Ted even seeming to like Jamie any more than anyone else. It also doesn't extend to Ted helping Jamie with his father in any way. The best thing Ted did for Jamie was force Roy to connect with him and then he's basically left them to it, handed Jamie off to Roy. There is very little to imply that Ted and Jamie are close. Maybe people WANT them to be closer, want them to hug and spend time together and talk about big things, but the fact is, that isn't actually how they are. Jamie barely feels comfortable speaking to Ted in general let alone Ted being his go-to person. They have no real relationship to speak of beyond the very general coaching one and sometimes the stuff I see people say is... wild to me. Ted has never even hugged Jamie - Ted in fact never hugs any of the players, only the other coaches. I'm told this may be a Midwestern thing, that it's not appropriate for coaches to touch players in the USA, but that's not how it is in English football.

With the Jamie/Jamie paper, I think that Ted and Beard were trying to compliment Jamie. Reward him for being right about Zava or something. Like hey, you're our star, you took all that with good grace. Little treat for you, Jamie. We wanna make you feel a bit special. But even in doing that, what they think is nice, it's a complete and fundamental misread of who he is. They don't see him. And he shouldn't have had to MAKE them see him, with that tactic at the end of 3.07. That was not his job. They should have known the correct way to use their best player in this tactic. But they either thought he wouldn't want to do it, or didn't think he could do it? All of it leads to the coaches still not really getting Jamie.

I mean, I do think there are interesting threads between Jamie & Ted (that I would like to see resolved in s3, the panic attack connection being one of them), and I would argue that Ted did play an imperative role in shifting Jamie's perspectives in s1 and that he later had a massive impact by allowing him to come back to Richmond when Jamie really needed someone to believe that he could be better. So I do think Jamie values & respects Ted and vis versa, I just don't think they have a father/son relationship or really anything beyond coach/player (as you say, I think Ted is far from Jamie's go-to person, and that's perfectly okay!)

I feel a lot of fans are passionate about assigning Jamie a pseudo-father because they know his own dad is such an utter shit, when in my opinion there's not actually a character on the show who fits that role for Jamie. Also...it's not even a role Jamie needs or necessarily even wants filled at this stage in his life? He has a lot of people who care about him and a big and important found family; he doesn't need a father-figure to be a complete or healed person, and I actually think that's a fundamental part of his arc.

Also, my hot take is that the relationship a lot of people want Jamie to have with Ted is the one Nate actually did have with him. It's just that less people care about Nate, so.

All that said, it's also fandom and if people want Ted & Jamie to have a father/son relationship (and clearly a lot of people do) I'm not faulting them for it. Like go & run free with your popular head-canons! (I personally just don't think there's any basis for it in canon.)

As for the Jamie/Jamie paper...I think the most generous read is that the coaches wanted Jamie to look at himself differently and play around with it on his own, with the expectation that he would come to conclusions similar to what he actually did on the show; while the least generous read is that none of the coaches understand who he is in the slightest or how far he's come and just thought he was gonna throw a huge fit if they didn't keep him up front. Probably the reality is something in between (I mean, I assume Roy contributed to coming up with the pairings, and I do think Roy gets Jamie. But I also agree there is a big gap in understanding in how Beard & Ted view him, and they aren't really seeing him right now in a lot of ways.)

I am gonna give Ted a pass on the hugging thing because yeah, I think that can be chalked up to different coaching styles and differing American versus English sports culture. You can take the man out of Kansas but--

[peraltiagos-paper-rings]

ok maybe i missed something but...why was it not an option for henry and michelle to move to richmond?? like i know people have said "stop acting like ted has NOTHING to go back to, he surely has friends and colleagues and extended family back in kansas" and sure but idk i just feel we haven't seen enough of his home life in kansas to really care about the people he left behind other than henry, plus we really don't see him feeling homesick for kansas or missing anyone from kansas other than henry?? so it really feels to me that he just went home to his son, his ex-wife and his mom who he has a complicated relationship with and maybe some friends he hasn't seen in years, meanwhile his best friend and his found family are all back in richmond.

and i kinda feel the same about michelle like you might say it wouldn't be fair to expect her to just uproot her life for her ex-husband, leave her job and her friends and family behind, but again we don't really know enough about her personal life or her job or her friends or anything so like...i'm just not invested enough in her to care if she has to leave people behind, sorry i guess?? same with henry, i'm sure he has friends in kansas but he can still stay in touch with them in richmond, the internet exists, and he can play roblox with them like he does with ted and stuff like that.

and it just feels like henry would've loved living in richmond. he could move there with his mom so he'd have both of his parents and uncle beard close to him, he'd be able to go to football games and see his favourite footballer jamie tartt and also visit his dad's cool job where nate is and the richmond boys will play football with him. plenty of parents move their kids closer to where their jobs are so it wouldn't be unusual. and rebecca offered to find michelle a nice job and get henry into a good school, so there's that covered. it's kind of implied that henry's struggling at school, he's failing science - maybe he wouldn't mind going to a new school. maybe they could've had it so that that random bullying arc would encourage him to want to move to richmond. like instead of him randomly bullying a kid, maybe he's being bullied at school and doesn't like his teachers (hence why he's doing bad in some classes) so he'd be glad to go to a new school. obviously we don't know this is happening i'm just saying they could've rewritten that arc to give henry the push to want to go live with ted in richmond.

it's also implied that henry doesn't like dr jacob and there might be a strain on michelle's relationship with dr jacob - during the match he's sitting apart from them, clearly not interested in the match while they keep shushing him, idk it just gave the vibe of him pulling away from them and having nothing in common with them, on top of the implication that michelle and dr jacob did not get engaged in paris when perhaps it would've been expected for them to. so if michelle breaks up with dr jacob and moves to richmond with henry, that could make them both happy. plus if henry really is struggling with missing his dad, that would also be fixed by him moving to richmond. and ted would be able to stay in this whole community that loves him and supports him.

i also just don't like the implication that ted just cut everyone out of his life after going back to kansas?? maybe i'm overreacting but like, him not being at his best friend beard's wedding or at the team gathering at the higginses or anything showing he's aware that sam made it onto the nigerian national team, like it really seems he just isn't in any of their lives anymore??? they all just moved on like he was never there???? i know their lives don't have to come to a standstill just because he isn't there but idk it just made me feel sad to see them all there together without him and without even a hint of his presence in their lives, like not even a "hey congrats!" text or a good luck card from ted on roy's desk or anything...it makes me wonder if he did the same when he came to richmond and stopped staying in contact with anyone in kansas, like maybe he really does have no one close to him other than michelle and henry back in kansas. when we see his texts on his phone in one episode, i think in "we'll never have paris," i'm pretty sure we don't see any recent texts to or from anyone other than richmond members and michelle...

[lilaabard]

listen i love ted but it's honestly baffling to me how we're on season three of the show and he still has zero football knowleage. how. how is that possible

[the-magicians-ravens]

Truly the greatest surprise twist in the finale was Beard's name being fucking Willis.

It's somehow fitting, though.

[hypokeimena]

some of ted lasso is very good and some of ted lasso is LIKE, i don't know how to put it, so self-conscious about what it's Doing As An Artistic Project that it just cannot help itself from putting in vague little jokes that SHOULD have real (in-) world consequences and don't. or jokes that are so clearly not a thing a character would say. but a writer was pissing themselves at how funny it was. so it stayed in. and it Should Not Have

[psqqa]

rebecca welton i love you but every dutch bike path has a bike printed on it every 10m or so, so like how??