Kulusevski Bench Place Against Coventry Is Reported By Five Outlets, Each Adding A Bolder Verb
Philippa Crane · Media Editor · Reading time: one pint
Roberto De Zerbi said on Sunday that Dejan Kulusevski will be on the bench against Coventry on Monday, and five outlets had reported it by breakfast without adding a single fact.
A bench place for Dejan Kulusevski against Coventry on Monday night was reported by five separate outlets before nine o'clock on Monday morning, the Herald can confirm, and the bench was the same size in all of them.
The original information is understood to be a single sentence from Roberto De Zerbi's Sunday press conference, in which he said Kulusevski would be on the bench after the medical staff gave the okay. It runs to fourteen words and contains no adjective.
By the first outlet it had become Kulusevski named on the bench. By the second he was set for return. By the third he had been handed a place, a verb that suggests a gift, though the club confirms nobody was handed anything but a shirt.
Fourth one said he'd been thrown back in. I looked at the first one again. It said bench.
The man, a Tottenham supporter who read all five at his kitchen table while the toast went cold, said he had checked each for a second source and found that each cited the one before it. He added that he now had a fuller understanding of the bench than of the player.
By the fifth outlet, the Herald notes, the bench had become a dramatic comeback gamble. The piece also confirms that Savio, Pedro Porro and Lucas Bergvall will miss out, which was in the original sentence's neighbouring sentence and has not been improved on since.
Kulusevski has not played since May 2025, a fact all five outlets reproduced faithfully, apart from the one that rounded 500 days up to a lifetime.
The toast was eventually eaten cold, on the bench of a kitchen chair.
Before you go
The Monday Post-Mortem
The match report, in your inbox the morning after every game.
Free. One email per fixture. Unsubscribe whenever you like.
