Podcasts only playing NEWEST episode

[Idw_89]

I’ve been recently trying to play old episodes of multiple podcasts I have followed and listened to for years, however the app plays the NEWEST episode of that podcast no matter what I try. I’ve marked some episodes as ‘Played/Unplayed’ to see if it changes but no luck. 
Also have always had issues with podcasts not ‘remembering’ where i’d last listened to an episode and makes me scroll endlessly to find it again, every single episode!! Irritating. Any advice? Have logged out of my account and performed a clean restart and both issues still persist.