The Hoddle of Coffee: Tottenham Hotspur News and Links for Monday, December 18

Hey, Hoddlers!

That was a rough one on Saturday, wasn’t it? And now the team has a match against Burnley in a match very important to the top four race. That’s right. Burnley are in the top four race. What a time to be alive! (Sorry to be so mean, Burnley.)

How about we distract ourselves with a ramble (or skip over it entirely to debate the finer points of the match against Manchester City, which I’m sure some of you will)?

Ramble of the Day

I do not know if you nice people have run into this story, but the one and only Mousa Dembélé owns a hotel in Antwerp with his family. It made headlines last week because there was hidden treasure in the basement of the hotel, but for me, the takeaway was that Dembélé has a hotel.

I decided late Friday afternoon that I needed to find this hotel, and so I took to Google to find it. Turns out, it was not that hard.

The hotel’s name is De Gulde Schoen, or The Golden Shoe in Dutch, and it is very fancy. The pictures of the nine suites available at De Gulde Schoen demonstrate just that; many of the suites’ features are made from “natural and exclusive materials like marble and hardwood.” Detail is clearly something the Dembélé family is interested in.

I wanted to stay at this hotel. I quickly made my way to the Contact & Reservations page. A stay at De Gulde Schoen will cost a pretty penny, though, as the cheapest rate (at least for random dates I selected in the middle of April) for a room is €385 (£340 / $453). Clearly, if raking in the cash as a footballer is not enough, doing so as a hotel owner should help him out.

The hotel opens on March 19, 2018, so I guess I will start saving up. Other options, though, include going to the hotel bar and restaurant, which probably is also expensive, though those details are not on the website.

I wonder, though, if you can get a discount for showing up in a Dembélé jersey.

Okay, it’s links time!

Links of the Day

Gareth Southgate remembers Ugo Ehiogu for The Guardian.

Also from The Guardian, this weekend’s 12 best photographs from Premier League action.

World Cup winner Kaká has announced his retirement.