The Hoddle of Coffee: Tottenham Hotspur news and links for Monday, November 2

Hi, everyone!

Let’s start things with some really cool Day of the Dead kits.

Ramble of the Day

Tottenham delivered two times the Halloween video content it usually does, one featuring players of the women’s team and one featuring players from the men’s team. Neither idea was new, but that didn’t really matter because both had the ability to provide some good Halloween entertainment.

I’m going to share both videos, and while I’ll encourage you to watch them if you have the time, I’m also going to make you guess which one’s the good one and which one’s the bad one.

What’s in the box is always a classic exercise, because it’s pretty revealing about how easily people scare. The fun thing about this one is the dramatic contrast we see — Rosella Ayane definitely scares easily, but not nearly as much as Aurora Mikalsen — the clip of her freaking out after poking a pineapple is priceless. (I also find it completely relatable because I could totally imagine myself acting this way.) Completely on the opposite end were Chloe Peplow and Becky Spencer, who came with absolutely no fear and managed to guess correctly, Spencer especially.

Appearing from behind to scare your teammates is also a classic way to create some Halloween fun, but this session was a complete failure. Almost none of the Spurs players were genuinely scared, and you have to put the blame on the chief scarers of the day, Serge Aurier and Lucas Moura. They seemed to rely solely on the element of surprise, and either the camera didn’t catch it because of the angle or the two didn’t time their scare right with the light flicker, but they didn’t seem to be particularly scary — just surprising. This is no way to honor the legacy Kyle Walker left behind, as a trailblazer in Halloween content at Tottenham. This club has had better days with Halloween videos, so I don’t doubt an ability to rebound next year, but it must be without Aurier and Moura because they did not live up to the job.

tl;dr: Tottenham provided a double dose of Halloween content this year, and the video with the women’s team is much better than the men’s.

Stay informed, read this: Shireen Ahmed on the recent bullying scandal in the NHL that saw the Arizona Coyotes cut ties with Mitchell Miller, but not necessarily demonstrate an anti-bullying stance for The Guardian

Links of the Day

Three LAFC players, two Minnesota United players and multiple Tampa Bay Rowdies players tested positive for COVID-19.
The USL Championship was called off because of the positive COVID-19 cases for Tampa Bay.

England World Cup winner Sir Bobby Charlton was diagnosed with dementia.

A longer read: Rory Smith on the Pirate League, a South American super league of the 1950s for The New York Times