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Former Cameroonian international Benoit Assou-Ekoto had no interest in football according to England football legend and former teammate Peter Crouch.

 

Assou-Ekotto, 39, spent nine years at Spurs from 2006 to 2015, where he made 202 appearances for the club.

 

In two of those seasons, Assou-Ekoto played with Peter Crouch, 42, who featured as one of Harry Redknapp’s strikers while they competed for the Champions League places.

In an interview with Dailymail, Crouch revealed his former teammate was a weird guy

 

“He would tell us straight out that he had no interest in football whatsoever. He genuinely didn’t like it. At 1.30pm on a Saturday he’d have no idea which team you were playing.

 

‘But Benoît, we’ve been talking about them in training all week…’

 

And so to his pre-match meal. Now none of us are adventurous. It’s pasta, chicken, no sauce, and has been for the past 20 years. Benoît 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.

 

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. We accepted it, along with all the other weirdness: 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, on the rather basic premise that they were ‘too cold’.

 

Benoît was a really weird guy but we loved him a lot.”

 

After leaving Tottenham eight years ago, Assou-Ekotto spent one year at Saint-Etienne and two years at Metz, before retiring in 2018.