The Hoddle of Coffee: Tottenham Hotspur News and Links for Thursday, January 25

What’s up, Hoddlers?

I’ve retweeted a Very Important Twitter Poll (VITP) in the last few hours about children named after fruit, and spent much of my night discussing bad — but funny — names for children.

Now, I will get to that ramble.

Ramble of the Day

Like most days, I was on the big ol’ Internet yesterday, and I stumbled upon this Independent article from March 2008 about former France coach Raymond Domenech’s roster decisions. A few of you may already know this, but he openly admitted to being influenced by zodiac signs.

Here are some of his hot takes from that piece and from a Guardian interview he did in 2016:

• Scorpios always work against the interests of those born under the sign of Aquarius. Robert Pirès was one of the Scorpios phased out of Aquarius Domenech’s France side.
• Leos are bad defenders. Domenech once said, “When I have got a Leo in defence, I’ve always got my gun ready. I know he’s going to want to show off at one moment or another and cost us.” William Gallas, by the way, is a Leo.
• Capricorns are “quite organised, straight, rather introverted but very determined.”
• Geminis “go in all directions so you can’t strap them into a chair and say ‘you have to do your work’ because they will do it naturally while roaming from one room to another.”

That’s all I got in terms of research. Domenech did write a book called Tout Seul, which may or may not be translated into English. (If not, I will just read the original French.) I need to know what he thinks of Virgos like myself.

Anyway, I took it upon myself to look up the zodiac signs of the Tottenham team, loaned out players, coaching staff, and Daniel Levy included.

• There are multiple members of the team born under Aquarius — Christian Eriksen, Harry Winks, Georges-Kévin N’Koudou, and Daniel Levy. There are, however, no Scorpios, so I guess there are no conflicts.
• Harry Kane and Moussa Sissoko are the resident Leos, so I suppose Domenech would find them to be bad defenders.
• There are a lot of neat and tidy Capricorns on this team: Hugo Lloris, Eric Dier, Juan Foyth, Paolo Gazzaniga, Serge Aurier, Cameron Carter-Vickers, and first team coach Miguel D’Agostino.
• The free-spirited Geminis are Davinson Sánchez and Vincent Janssen.

Make of that what you will.

tl;dr: I made fun of former France coach Raymond Domenech for his interest in zodiac signs.

Would you like some links?

Links of the Day

Footballers are finally evading taxes in the UK! Brighton’s Glenn Murray is the first one to follow in the footsteps of his La Liga counterparts, and has been arrested over £1.1 million tax fraud.

The man that led Saudi Arabia to their first World Cup since 2002, Bert van Marwijk, will now coach Australia at the World Cup this summer.

Kaiserslautern’s match Darmstadt had to be abandoned at halftime after the away side’s coach, Jeff Strasser, suffered a heart attack. He was taken to the hospital, though there are no further updates.

Joey Barton, currently serving a betting related suspension, believes half of the players playing professionally in England are breaking the FA’s betting rules.

A longer read to go with the Barton piece on the sport’s betting culture.