The Hoddle of Coffee: Tottenham Hotspur news and links for Friday, November 23

Hey, everyone!

Hope everyone enjoyed a great dinner last night, Thanksgiving or not. Harry Redknapp certainly didn’t on episode 4 of I’m a Celebrity, because he never does.

Ramble of the Day

With all ten contestants together, it changes the dynamic a little bit. Primarily, it means that whatever the audience has learned about the contestants, the contestants themselves have to learn. A little bit of fresh life is breathed into everyday interactions as a result. John Barrowman still loves making people happy and finding out personal things about his cast mates, and of course, James McVey and Fleur East can’t help but listen to Harry Redknapp’s stories. He’s easy to listen to, but it turns out that the guy is a little bit more than that.

Again, he wasn’t called upon to perform any tasks, as Barrowman was selected for the Bushtucker Trial and Nick Knowles and Emily Atack teamed up for the Dingo Dollar Challenge. He has finally gotten involved in the niceness and camaraderie that everyone else has been showing, though, first by giving up his hammock/bed for East. (I suppose there weren’t enough beds for everyone, which is strange because everyone is being forced to stay there.) Barrowman, too, gave up his bed for Hegerty, while Knowles gave the pillow that was his luxury item to her in the previous episode.

Redknapp and Barrowman, meanwhile, have created a special bond. After doing a duet and swapping stories in episode three, the former Tottenham Hotspur boss walked him off to his trial, along with Sair Khan. “You’ll be fantastic,” he told Barrowman before he swam into a sunken ship surrounded by eels, snakes, and a crocodile and earned everyone a meal. When Barrowman came back to the camp to share the good news, Redknapp was the first to hug him.

Redknapp snuck in a Tottenham reference after East asked him which teams he’d managed, also mentioning Bournemouth and Portsmouth. He eventually got into a story about being on safari, likely on Spurs’ 2011-12 preseason tour of South Africa, and it’s a quickly summarized one: Three days is enough in South Africa, and a week is too much, and once you’ve seen a few animals, you’ve seen them all.

With Redknapp, there were still animal-related takes, as the powers that be delivered some alpaca neck for the jungle dwellers. Redknapp almost immediately made a vomiting gesture, still upset over the fact that the camp answered the trivia question about reminiscing over school years incorrectly. The question was whether 40% or 50% of adults believed their school years were their best, a question which, in a strange twist of events, Hegerty got wrong and Redknapp got right. The logic was pretty simple: “My school years were the best years of my life,” and it turns out about half of the people surveyed agreed. His reward was supposed to be jam roly-poly pudding, which he loves. Our reward was finding out that he once had a £1000 bar bill before a Diana Ross concert.

In fact, jam roly-poly became the new bacon sandwich, because Redknapp referenced it three times before he started talking about spotted dick pudding. His dessert that night, though, was papaya, which sounds awesome to me, but I don’t know how a guy who thinks scrambled eggs is being wild feels about papaya. As for that aforementioned alpaca, he did wonder how many animals there were in Australia.

There was another animal related incident right at the end, this time with a snake. Redknapp didn’t have to eat it (this time, anyway), but one snuck its way into camp. Upon the advice of a contestant, he ran from it, later announcing, “That’s the fastest I’ve moved in 40 years!”

Finally, though, episode 4 gave me hope for episode 5, because no one was voted to participate in the next Bushtucker trial. Instead, everyone gets to vote on who will face the next one! Will the camaraderie finally come to an end in the jungle? We’ll all find out soon, but I won’t share until Monday. Enjoy your weekends, all — I plan on doing just that with I’m a Celebrity.

tl;dr: Redknapp sounds off on the animal kingdom.

Links of the Day

Mauricio Pochettino says the team expects to move into the new stadium in January or February.

The IFAB has rejected the ABBA style of taking penalties and supports the idea to make the handball rule clearer.

Sadio Mané has signed a new deal with Liverpool, keeping him at the club until 2023.

FC Basel’s senior women’s team was treated to sandwiches in a different room after selling raffle tickets while its senior men’s team enjoyed the festivities at the club’s 125 anniversary gala.

Today’s longer read: Ben Fisher interviews former Birmingham City defender Michael Johnson on getting more than 40 rejections and coaching the Guyana men’s national team for The Guardian