Two tiny coaches in dark coats seen from behind stand beneath a giant blank-faced clock with tangled blank chat bubbles floating above a dusk stadium touchline.

Paper TalkThe High Road Herald

Group Chat Carries Sky Sports Motion On Tottenham v Coventry And Minutes Kick-Off As Eight O'Clock

Philippa Crane · Media Editor19 October · Reading time: one pint

Tottenham host Coventry live on Sky Sports Main Event and Sky Sports Premier League tonight, with coverage from 6.30pm and kick-off at 8pm, according to the Evening Standard, in the sides' first league meeting since March 2001.

A Tottenham group chat convened on the upper deck of a London bus this afternoon and carried, by seven votes to none, a motion that tonight's Premier League fixture against Coventry will be shown live on Sky Sports.

The position, which the Herald understands was reached at 4.12pm between Camden and Holloway, followed the member who proposed it reading the relevant paragraph aloud from his phone, twice, to establish that it said what it said.

Sky Sports Main Event or Sky Sports Premier League. Either. I've checked both.

The chat recorded that coverage begins at 6.30pm, with kick-off at 8pm, and that this timetable is not subject to amendment by any member, including the one who has already said he will be late.

A second member asked whether the match could also be watched online. The chair confirmed that subscribers may use the Sky Go app and website, and the item was marked noted.

The chat then turned to Dejan Kulusevski, who is in the matchday squad, and resolved that his hopes of an appearance depend largely on the game state. It adopted the phrase verbatim and used it four times before Highbury Corner.

Members also observed that the fixture is the first league meeting between the sides since March 2001, a point the oldest member described as a long time ago and then declined to expand on.

The bus reached its terminus at 4.40pm and the chat has asked to be reminded at seven.

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A line of wheeled beach huts stuffed with bunk beds trundles along a seafront behind a capped figure in a training jacket carrying a pint glass.

Paper TalkThe High Road Herald

Pulis Blackpool Beach Column Passes Four Sites By Breakfast And Gains Only Extra Beds

Philippa Crane · Media Editor19 October · Reading time: one pint

Pulis writes in a column that Spurs' Marbella trip resembles the Blackpool pre-season weeks of his playing days, with Coventry due on Monday night, and a Tottenham kitchen table heard it four times before nine.

A column by Pulis on Spurs' team-bonding trip to Marbella reached a Tottenham kitchen table on Monday morning, where it was read aloud four times, each time slightly larger than the last.

The original piece, which compares the trip with Blackpool pre-seasons of his playing days, states that players shared three-quarter beds in a guest house and trained on the sand. It also says Roberto De Zerbi will have used the camp to monitor the personalities in the group.

By the second website, the guest house had become "a shared-bed regime". By the third, the sand had become "punishing beach work", and the Marbella trip was described as being "under the microscope".

Four of them now, and I've still not been told anything about Coventry.

The Herald has compared all four pieces line by line. Each one cites the same column, the same guest house and the same beach, and the fourth adds the word "revealed" to a headline whose subject had been published openly three minutes earlier.

No outlet has added a fresh fact, a name, a quote or a bed. One site did add a photograph of a seaside bucket, which was in the original.

The Tottenham man at the table, who describes himself as "across it", is understood to have asked whether anyone would be reporting on the match itself, and was told it takes place on Monday night.

The toast has gone cold.

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