The Hoddle of Coffee: Tottenham Hotspur news and links for Monday, February 25

Hi, all!

I’ll be honest: the ramble got derailed a bit as I got distracted watching the Oscars. I’m not rambling about that, though.

Ramble of the Day

I’ve tuned into Manifest, an NBC show that just wrapped up its first season. It’s a show about a bunch of people who get on a plane, go missing, and turn up five-and-a-half years later. The show itself is fine, but I’m not here to give a review of it today. It’s a very serious show, but I love telling jokes and making snide remarks, and so I always love to talk about the things they might have missed from roughly March 2013 to September 2018.

If I had missed that much time, I’d obviously need quite a primer on current affairs. I’d also probably ask a ton of questions about who won sporting events. At this point, I’d have missed two men’s World Cups and a women’s World Cup, and that’s just to start. I’d need to know so many winners, and how certain teams did, and how my high school graduation was, also. (It wasn’t that special.)

In Tottenham related things, I would have missed Gareth Bale leaving and the journey of the seven signings bought with the Bale money, the demise of André Villas-Boas, the rise and fall of Tim Sherwood, and Mauricio Pochettino’s transformation of the team, plus the emergence of around half of the current squad. It would be a ton to catch up on, and like I said, I would have missed the Tim Sherwood era!

I’d also need to know about the movies, television shows, and cultural events that I missed. I wouldn’t have known about the time Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced La La Land as the Best Picture winner instead of Moonlight, and I wouldn’t know anything about hose two movies or the directors! There are likely a ton of very famous people that I wouldn’t know about, like half the people nominated for Grammys this year. I would have missed a lot of memes and internet jokes, which might be the worst thing.

The people in the show basically spend most of their time dealing with a conspiracy surrounding their disappearance and their messy love lives, but imagine all the downtime they spend trying to learn about what they missed. It’s probably overwhelming.

tl;dr: Missing five-plus years means missing a lot.

Links of the Day

Claude Puel has been sacked by Leicester City, ending a 16-month spell managing the team.

Chelsea’s Kepa Arrizabalaga has apologized to Maurizio Sarri after refusing a substitution in the Carabao Cup final on Sunday.

Will Ferrell is set to star as corrupt former FIFA Executive Committee member Chuck Blazer in a film for HBO.

Today’s longer read: Andy Brassell on the impact new head of sport Thomas Hitzlsperger is making at VfB Stuttgart for The Guardian