Monday Hoddle of Coffee: News and Links for October 9th, 2017

Happy Monday Spursland!

Rejoice, for the bleak and joyless experience that is the international break has produced a solitary silver lining for Spurs fans- namely, Harry Winks’ stellar England debut against Lithuania yesterday evening. Having tracked his career for a number of years on this site I felt like a proud soccer mom/dad watching him pick up his first cap yesterday- not least because I also spent the whole game ranting and raving at his coach for having no idea what he’s doing.

Hoddle Theme of the Day below and then under that, your links.

Links

Lots and lots of positive responses this morning to young Winksy’s first bow for the English national team last night- the BBC report named him as man of the match, whilst the Evening Standard and the Independent also praised his performance amongst an otherwise sluggish England performance.

Harry Kane might be on an incredible scoring run for England at the moment but Gareth Southgate has said he won’t rush the decision on whether or not to name him captain at the upcoming World Cup. To be fair to Southgate, he does have a whole load of other credible candidates lined up to step into the role right here in this empty room filled with nobody.

Elsewhere in football...

Less goodwill to be seen in the Caledonian press this morning after the Scottish national team missed out on a World Cup play-off place with a 2-2 draw to Slovenia. Manager Gordon Strachan bizarrely blamed ‘genetics’ for the team’s failure to progress in the managerial press-conference equivalent of Tony Montana’s last stand.

A late Mo Salah penalty means that Egypt will be heading to Russia in their first WC return since 1990.

Here’s CFC’s own Kevin McCauley on Christian Pulisic’s incredible influence on the USA’s weekend qualifier with Panama.

And finally...

Another positive step forwards in the battle against discrimination in football as Charlton Athletic lend their name to a local LGBT team.