The Hoddle of Coffee: Tottenham Hotspur news and links for Monday, February 11

Hey, everyone!

I only compared the Grammys to Eurovision twice 70 minutes into the broadcast. (I don’t think it’s really like Eurovision, for what it’s worth.)

Ramble of the Day

A standard weekend day for me is mostly just watching football from when I wake up until there aren’t any matches left to watch. On some days, that means I start with a Premier League match at 7:30a and end with a La Liga match that finishes at 4:45p. It’s a great way to spend most of a lazy Saturday or Sunday, especially since nothing else is actually on television worth watching.

There is a little bit of a downside, though. I’ll start by asking you to watch this Cricket Wireless commercial:

I can’t claim to know all the thoughts in your all your heads, but I’ll take a wild guess and say a majority of you found this commercial to be some level of annoying. Now imagine hearing that exact thing over and over again during each commercial break for a few hours.

Here’s the thing about watching the same channel for more than an hour: they air the same commercials, so they naturally get on your nerves a little bit. You end up accidentally developing an intimate relationship with these commercials, to the point where you can recognize their sounds easily and play them in your head like you have a photographic memory. This is never a welcome thing, even with commercials that aren’t nearly as annoying as this Cricket Wireless one.

This is obviously an extreme example, but while I was watching Barcelona’s 0-0 draw with Athletic Bilbao, I winced every time the commercial played and once made crying sounds without intending to. The funny — or perhaps tragic — thing about this commercial is that I accepted its joke at the very beginning. There isn’t anything good about it, but I understood what they were trying to do and could live with it. Now my brain hurts when I think of the annoying “hiiiiiiiiiiiiiii” and “byeeeeeeeeee.”

Ultimately, commercials in large quantities are traumatizing, and I can’t imagine why anyone would think overwhelming anyone with engaging, but sometimes garish, sights and sounds is a good idea.

tl;dr: The downside of hours of football.

Links of the Day

A fire at Flamengo’s youth training complex killed ten and injured three on Friday.

Paris Saint-Germain’s Kylian Mbappé has donated £27,000 in efforts to find the body of pilot David Ibbotson, who was flying the plane carrying Emiliano Sala.

Two Southampton fans were detained by police after being spotted mocking the death of Emiliano Sala, and are expected to get lifetime bans from St Mary’s Stadium.

Former United States defender Fernando Clavijo has died at age 63 after a battle with cancer.

Today’s longer read: Simon Burton on Trevor Francis, the first £1 million footballer, for The Guardian