The Hoddle of Coffee: Tottenham Hotspur news and links for Wednesday, September 18

Hi, everyone!

Above is midfielder Rachel Furness, who scored Spurs’ game winner against Liverpool over the weekend. She’s on a season-long loan from Reading, and is a Northern Ireland international.

Ramble of the Day

Sometimes, a ramble topic comes to you, and in this case, it means I start by sharing an advertisement for Philadelphia cream cheese.

I could get angry about this, but they know they’re wrong, so I don’t need to. Still, I have a few thoughts regarding the Bagel That machine Philadelphia invented for this advertisement. (In case you didn’t watch the video: the Bagel That machine takes any object, puts a hole in it, and then the actors pretend anything with a hole in it is a bagel.)

The first item the mother in the ad takes her Bagel That machine to is a piece of toast, which then is topped with some cream cheese. I’m happy for her that her kids think it’s a bagel and she might not ever have to go out of her way to buy/make bagels again, but this is a waste of perfectly good bread. In fact, sliced bread is best when used for toast, and toasted bread works nicely with some cream cheese. If you leave the bread intact, you have more toast + cream cheese to enjoy.

Eventually, the Bagel That machine moves on only objects that don’t pair well with cream cheese: hot dog buns, pancakes, and omelettes, to name a few. It actually leaves a bad taste in my mouth when I think about the omelette, thinking about how close and yet how far they are from goat cheese. We continue to run into the problem of unnecessarily disposing of perfectly good food items.

The worst suggestion of all, though, is that a slice of pizza can be turned into a bagel by sticking a hole in it. The thing is, pizza bagels exist, and they’re nothing like wasting a perfectly good hole of regular pizza.

Photo by Lane Turner/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

A pizza bagel is a particular delicacy, and always begins with a bagel before moving on the pizza part. There’s a lot of flexibility from that point, but it’s a very specific art that only has so much attached to the more traditional pizza. It’s been popularized in the United States by Bagel Bites, the smaller version of a pizza bagel found in your supermarket freezer aisle, and at least at the time of my childhood, a staple for kids in the country.

For more reasons than one, the ad promotes wasteful and generally terrible eating habits with an annoying song, which is certainly a way to advertise your product. It serves the purpose it wants to, but my resident advertiser (my younger sister) calls it “lazy” and “unnecessary.”

Do what you must, but at the very least, try to avoid insulting pizza bagels (and bagels, really).

tl;dr: A bad commercial insulted not just bagels, bread, and omelettes, but pizza bagels, too.

Links of the Day

Cagliari has avoided punishment after fans shouted racist abuse at Inter Milan’s Romelu Lukaku.

Amnesty International and a union of journalists have written the presidents of Juventus and Lazio asking them not to play the Italian Super Cup in Saudi Arabia.

Manchester City’s John Stones will miss up to six weeks with a thigh injury.

David Squires draws out the downfall of Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City at the play of Daniel Farke’s Norwich in his latest cartoon.

Today’s longer read: Jamie Jackson interviews Bolton manager Keith Hill on coaching the team after its administration struggles and the pressure of relegation for The Guardian

Bonus link: The Guardian is selling a print of a foggy White Hart Lane in 1964 for £55.