The Hoddle of Coffee: Tottenham Hotspur news and links for Tuesday, March 23

Hello, everyone!

I’m not doing another spring-themed ramble, but I saw this and I have new baking and eating aspirations now.

Ramble of the Day

My younger sister stumbled upon a headline from the Daily Mail the other day that had the potential to spark multiple conversations. (This feels like the right place to clarify that my sister does not read the Daily Mail.) The first thing was that the Daily Mail has a very weird practice of awfully wordy and occasionally confusing headlines, but we won’t have that conversation today. What I’d like to focus on is the subject of the headline:

It’s pretty clear that the main idea here is that: there’s an actor playing the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten in a tv show; Johnny Rotten is an Arsenal fan; and the actor is a Tottenham fan. I’ll save you a click (or in this case, actual Googling since I didn’t actually link you to the article) and let you know the tv show is Pistol, an upcoming miniseries from Danny Boyle, and that the actor is relative unknown Anson Boon.

Many of us are the type to take in the information about famous Spurs fans without needing much else, but Boon’s Spurs fandom is interesting in its own right. He can enjoy some of the perks of being relatively famous, but carries the energy of the average Spurs fan in his interactions in a way that’s endearing. It’s as if any one of us got to hang pitchside at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium out of the blue and interact with well-known people in the world of English football.

Boon went to Spurs’ home opener of the 2019-20 season, a 3-1 win over Aston Villa. He spoke to Spurs’ website about the day, and this is where the perks of being an actor come in for him. Then-NBC Sports Premier League analyst Kyle Martino invited his then-mother-in-law Susan Sarandon to the game, and she invited Boon, her co-star in Blackbird:

It’s funny, ever since I did the film Blackbird with Susan, I keep getting into these really weird situations. ... Villa with Susan was my first match at the new stadium, so that was special anyway. I couldn’t make the last few games of last season because I was filming. When Susan asked if I wanted to go to the Villa game, I’d already bought a ticket from the Ticket Exchange! She said, ‘do you want to come?’ and I said ‘yes, of course I will!’

This is really only the beginning of finding out that Boon is extremely normal. He described working on Blackbird, which also starred Kate Winslet, Mia Wasikowska, and Sam Neill, as being “someone like Oliver Skipp walking into the dressing and the likes of Harry Kane, Hugo Lloris, Heung-Min Son are all in there.” The best quote in the piece, though, might be about meeting Kane:

I don’t live in London and I don’t really mix in showbusiness circles, all my mates are my mates from school, they are all football fans like me – unfortunately they don’t support Tottenham – but for them to see I met Harry Kane and all the other amazing people, it’s bizarre.

He really did the type of things that would be a dream day out for a Spurs fan, and he seemed to enjoy it in such a pure way. He got to do one more thing that didn’t make it in that interview, though:

He got his cherry on top — he got to insult a retired Arsenal player in Lee Dixon, and with a sizable US tv audience and the video as proof.

tl;dr: Actor Anson Boon is a Tottenham fan on the rise, and he’s basically just a very normal Tottenham fan who happens to end up in situations where he can brag about meeting Harry Kane and insult Lee Dixon on television.

Stay informed, read this: Ben Smith on the collaboration between The Boston Globe and author Ibram X. Kendi to create a newsroom that is built to cover racism for The New York Times

Links of the Day

Police in Scotland are investigating an allegation that Rangers’ Alfredo Morelos was racially abused on social media.

Chelsea’s Roman Abramovich filed a defamation lawsuit against the author and publisher of Putin’s People, a book that claims he bought the club at the Russian president’s request.

Cameroon’s Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting reportedly will not join his national team this week because he did not receive the email to accept his call-up.

A longer read: David Conn on Football’s Darkest Secret, a BBC documentary detailing the sexual abuse scandal in English youth football in the late 20th century for the Guardian