Tottenham hero ‘didn’t like football’ and ate the same unusual lunch before every match

It’s romantic to think that deep down, all professional footballers are simply in it for the love of the game. Yes, there’s the money, the glamour, the elevation to national or even global fame, but beneath it all the primary motivation is surely to fulfil the dream a player has had since he kicked the ball around his garden as a youngster.

Or maybe not. It seems that for one former star, who played more than 200 games for in a seven-year stint, it really was just a case of turning up for work.

Defender Benoit Assou-Ekotto joined Spurs from Lens in 2006, and also had a stint on loan in the with QPR before eventually returning to France.

His time in north-London coincided with playing for , with the pair team-mates for two years from 2009 to 2011. And the forward recalled the attitude of the Cameroon international, who didn’t waste time worrying about upcoming opponents.

“He would tell us straight out that he had no interest in football whatsoever,” Crouch told . “He genuinely didn’t like it. At 1.30pm on a Saturday he’d have no idea which team you were playing. ‘But Benoit, we’ve been talking about them in training all week…'”

That wasn’t all the now 40-year-old was notorious for at . According to Crouch, the left-back wasn’t one to embrace the strict nutritional advice that players are subjected to.

“Benoit would turn up with a Tesco’s bag containing the same four items every time: a croissant, a hot chocolate, a full-fat Coke and a packet of crisps,” he said. “The croissant I understood. He is French-Cameroonian. The hot chocolate: same cultural backstory. He used to dip the first into the second.

“But the crisps, and the Coke — it was like two discrete lunches, one belonging to a middle-aged Parisian and the other a 12-year-old on the Seven Sisters Road. And it worked. He was always in great shape and rarely injured.”

The ex- striker also outlined other weird habits of Assou-Ekotto. However he also stressed that the rest of the group learnt to accept the way he was, and he became a popular squad member.

“We accepted it, along with all the other weirdness,” he continued. “The random cars he would turn up to training in, sometimes a Smart car, then a Lamborghini; the way he would refuse to take ice baths for recovery. Benoit was a really weird guy but we loved him a lot.”

Assou-Ekotto also played for Lens, Saint-Etienne, and Metz, and won 23 caps at international level. He also played in two World Cups, and since retirement has described his stint in England as “the best time of my career.”