The Hoddle of Coffee: Tottenham Hotspur news and links for Thursday, September 13

Hello, all!

I’ll try to make today’s ramble a bit fun.

Ramble of the Day

As the football obsessed people we happen to be, we are familiar with the generic YouTube player highlight reel. Clips are packaged together to demonstrate whatever set of skills the player is good at, with some high-tempo techno music in the background to accompany the 10-minute long video. Basically, this Christian Eriksen highlight video is the most common form of highlight reels.

These are all good highlight videos that serve their intended purposes. Yet, there is a special group of highlight videos that keep the clips, but have a bit more fun in the music department. These are my favorite types of highlight reels.

I randomly decided to search for Christian Eriksen highlights before starting this ramble, and ran into a weird one that featured Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” and Drake’s “Find Your Love,” but let’s use the above Gareth Bale video from 2010 as a perfect example. I stumbled across this video on a Friday afternoon after coming home from school several years ago, and I have never forgotten it.

This video is set to Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie” ft. Rihanna, making for a discordant dynamic. Much of the song seems like the perfect background music to watching Bale score goals in the Champions League, as it has the right tempo and also carries a bit of seriousness. Yet, the start of it is jolting; hearing Rihanna open the song in a more soft way and watching these slow-motion shots of Bale is really unexpected, and made me not just burst into laughter as a teenager, but as I did as I watched the video for the first time in years before writing this ramble.

It takes a few watches to recover from that mismatch, but even then you’re still wondering: Why is a song about a toxic relationship background music to a Gareth Bale highlights video? The two just don’t seem to go together. I suppose, though, the actual contents of the song do not matter sometimes; it is the feeling that matters mots.

After a brief discussion of today’s Hoddle topic in the Cartilage Free Captain writers’ room, I found out that there is a section of YouTube dedicated to Lionel Messi and how the man never dives. This “Ultimate Rare Compilation” is similar to the other videos in the genre, but only without sound. Once you turn it on, you begin to watch random football highlights to the tune of...an instrumental version of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” that ends up morphing into Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida,” and then Tom Day’s “Crossroads.”

I’m not sure I will be able to reconcile watching Messi quickly running towards goal and fighting off tackles with the soft sounds of a piano playing a Taylor Swift song. I want to say that this person feels very specific emotions regarding Messi’s refusal to dive. It feels like an intense passion, likely rooted in admiration, for the player, which is an entirely normal reaction to watching a remarkably talented footballer. In which case, I praise this person’s efforts to keep things interesting and honest, even if I find the music choice to be strange.

I could just be overthinking it, though.

tl;dr: The weird world of YouTube highlight reels.

Links of the Day

Valencia and Russia midfielder Denis Cheryshev is being investigated for doping by Spanish anti-doping authorities.

Bolton Wanderers will avoid going into administration after an agreement was made to pay off the club’s debts.

John Terry will not be moving to Spartak Moscow after completing a medical, citing “family reasons” for not completing the transfer.

Liberian President George Weah played for his national team on Tuesday, 15 years after retiring from the sport.

Today’s longer read: Andrew Erickson spoke to Columbus Crew employees on the difficulties of going to work every day while the club’s future is up in the air as its owner attempts to relocate to Austin, Texas for The Columbus Dispatch