The guy is pretty much at the top of his profession. He’s probably paid about £2.5 million a year and is on a long-term contract. His company is in England and all of his business is conducted in English ……. but he doesn’t speak a word of it! Nice work if you can get it.
Yup – we’re talking football again.
I missed most of the Saturday night football round-up show as J and I had been invited out to dinner and despite a relatively bad head on Sunday morning, I was awake early enough to switch on the repeat show and see a couple of Spurs teammates pushing and shoving each other.
Now this is not an unknown phenomenon in British football, indeed when it involves a couple of Brits, they are usually punching each other’s lights out, whereas the foreigners, as the two I’m referring to just happen to be, push a bit, back off then approach each other and push a bit more. All very ‘handbags at ten paces’ stuff. One of the errant Spurs players is a guy called Benoît Assou-Ekotto and Harry Redknapp, his manager, summed up this particular, French-Cameroonian thus:
"Benoît is a strange boy," he said. "He's a bit highly strung and hardly speaks English. If you say something to him he's hard work. He hasn't improved his English in the couple of years he's been here."
Asked why his left-back had walked off alone (at the end of the game), apparently unhappy, Redknapp said: "He didn't know the result. He probably thought we'd drawn (when in fact Spurs won the match). He'll turn up Wednesday and play great, but he won't know we're playing Fulham until someone tells him. That's how he is. He's unreal. He walks off (the pitch) and he's thinking about the music he's going to play when he puts his headphones on."
As I say, nice work if you can get it!
However, his claim not to speak any English doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. When a fan called out “you’re shit”, in a game where he hadn’t performed particularly well and Spurs had been beaten, he most certainly understood what was being said and tried to get to the fan. In the absence of video footage of his latest transgression, see him trying to sort out the Spurs fan who let him know how he played that day.
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