Householder Reads Spurs Winless Start Ranking Five Times Over Toast And Finds The Same List

A Tottenham householder sat down at his kitchen table at 7.40am on Thursday and read, in sequence, five accounts of the fact that Spurs have not won any of their first five Premier League games.

The first, published by Football365, ranked the worst starts of each of the Big Six after five matches. It covered Manchester City's seven points last season, Manchester United's five in 2014/15, Arsenal's four in 2011/12, Chelsea's four in 2015/16 and Liverpool's two. The Herald understands this to be the original.

The second website called the start abysmal. The third called it historic. By the fourth it had become a crisis of unprecedented proportions, although the number of games played, and the number of those won, had not changed since the first.

It's the same list. Somebody has just put a worse word on top of it.

The householder checked each version against the last, as is his custom, and found that none contained a sixth game, a new result or a single fact absent from the original. Our correspondent confirms no new information was added at any stage, only emphasis.

By the fifth version a standfirst was describing the table as a verdict, a word the original had not used and the table had not requested.

At 8.15am he was found to have read the paragraph about 2014/15 four times, each time in a slightly different font. He described it as the best-written of the five.

He has put the kettle on again.