The Hoddle of Coffee: Tottenham Hotspur news and links for Thursday, May 21

Hello, all!

Getty has new pictures of current Tottenham players, so I’ll halt the informal retrospective we were having. Above is forward Harry Kane, if you remember him. (It’s been a while!)

Ramble of the Day

Following a team is simple business. You pick one, you let others know, and you suffer until you no longer can. Occasionally, though, people make things more complicated. This is where Matt Damon, a die hard supporter of baseball’s Boston Red Sox as a native Bostonian, enters the picture. He would definitely be the right type of person to understand the very simple rules of following a team, but Damon has left a very confusing track of crumbs on his football allegiances.

In order to make sense of it, I must come up with a comprehensive timeline of Damon talking about his allegiances, because he does it quite a bit and changes his answers frequently. Join me on this journey of conflicting stories, won’t you?

Summer 1997 Saving Private Ryan is in production in France and England.

Fall 2003 The Bourne Supremacy, sequel to The Bourne Identity, is in production. Matt Damon returns as protagonist Jason Bourne, with Paul Greengrass joining the series as the film’s director. The two develop a creative and personal bond, with the two collaborating on three more films.

July 2007 Greengrass and his sons, Kip and John, attend a Chelsea party in Los Angeles.

August 2007 On his press tour for The Bourne Ultimatum, Damon tells The Sun about his football allegiances. (The actual article is nowhere to be found, but the quotes have been attributed to The Sun by multiple people.) From that piece:

When I was in the UK for Saving Private Ryan, the only team they showed on TV consistently was Manchester United, but everyone on the crew assured me that was just like rooting for the New York Yankees, who I hate because I’m a huge Boston Red Sox fan. I don’t like supporting teams like Chelsea, Arsenal and Man U. There was this one poor, sad bastard on that movie who supported Leeds, so I would watch the Leeds games with him to try and cheer him up. But it didn’t work — they were terrible. I liked West Ham, though. I always try and catch one of their games when I’m over here.

December 2008 Damon participates in an initiative for The Willow Foundation, a charity started by Arsenal, former player and current broadcaster Bob Wilson with his wife Megs. This initiative was called art by celebrities, and Damon wrote “Go Arsenal” and “Tottenham sucks” on his artwork. This has led several to believe he is an Arsenal fan.

February 2010 Damon and Greengrass attend Chelsea’s 2-0 home victory over Arsenal. Photographic evidence exists, and Chelsea also tweeted about Damon’s attendance.

August 2013 Damon runs into the Everton team at a hotel in Los Angeles while he is promoting Elysium and the team is on its preseason tour.

February 2014 While promoting The Monuments Men, Damon is asked about Everton but admits he can’t call himself a fan because he hasn’t been following. He admits that his allegiance was with Chelsea, as Greengrass’s son supports the club. He contradicts his frequently cited 2007 interview with The Sun twice in one statement, when he claimed he didn’t want to support Chelsea and that he was a West Ham fan. We have confirmation that Greengrass’s son is a Chelsea fan — he was at the July 2007 event with his father and also at the February 2010 match with his father and Damon. Interestingly, though, Damon claims to be a West Ham fan in 2007, four years after he met Greengrass to film The Bourne Supremacy.

At the end, Damon says he’ll give supporting Everton a go — maybe he’s just being polite, though.

In some ways, the story was easy to piece together but the more I searched, the more I found. What I didn’t find, though, was an answer. Which club is it, Matt? Is it any club at all?

tl;dr: No one knows which football team Matt Damon supports, with West Ham, Chelsea, Arsenal, and Everton in the mix.

Links of the Day

Coronavirus:

• Bournemouth’s Jordon Ibe broke lockdown rules by getting a haircut.
• [in German] The Frauen-Bundesliga will return on May 29.
• Watford’s Adrian Mariappa was one of the three at his club that tested positive for COVID-19.
• Chelsea gave N’Golo Kanté permission to skip training Wednesday because of fears over the pandemic.

Aritz Aduriz retired after a 21 year career, and he will undergo hip replacement surgery.

Everton’s kits will now be manufactured by Hummel after five years with Umbro.

Today’s longer read: Noah Davis gathers stories on the feats of strength from MLS players for ESPN