Ex-Tottenham star Stephane Dalmat ‘quit a match 40 minutes early to get out of stadium and beat traffic’
EX-TOTTENHAM ace Bobby Zamora revealed how his old team-mate Stephane Dalmat quit DURING a game so he could catch a flight back to France.
Dalmat, now 44, spent the 2003/04 campaign on loan at Spurs from Inter Milan, making 22 appearances.
The midfielder scored three times during his spell in North London but it appears he was best remembered for his moment of madness during a league clash.
Zamora told Jimmy Bullard’s Off the Hook podcast: “We played a game at Spurs. In the first five minutes of the second half he just walked off the pitch.
“The ball wasn’t out of play or anything and he just starts walking off the pitch. I think I was on the bench and I thought he has pulled his hamstring or something.
“He walks down the tunnel. Doesn’t say anything to anybody. We played the game and then came in and he had shot.
“So we are like ‘Where is he, where is he? I don’t know. Not sure’. He was supposed to come in for the warm down – but he doesn’t come in for two days.
“I find out in the end that he has got a plane to catch and he can’t get to the airport after the game because of the traffic and all that so he has gone off the pitch, walked down the tunnel ‘off I go I’m going to get my plane’.
“He went back to home to France. He was just one of those players that just didn’t care.”
Dalmat also played for Paris Saint-Germain and Marseille but Zamora adds how he was one of the most talented players he had played with.
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He added: “He was an absolute player. He was strong, quick, powerful, you could not get the ball off him.
“He had that sort of French arrogance.
“He played for some mad big clubs but just nobody could manage him. He was just an absolute loon.”
The Spurs team at the time was managed by David Pleat who took over mid-season after Glenn Hoddle was fired from the job.
Other players in the team’s squad at the time were Jermain Defoe, Jamie Redknapp, Robbie Keane, Darren Anderton and captain Ledley King.
The revelation about Dalmat’s antics came after fellow footballer Jamie O’Hara, revealed the Frenchman slapped him across the face in the changing room following a dispute during a reserve team game for the North London club in the same season.
Speaking on TalkSport radio, O’Hara said: “Dalmat had come down to the reserves and I think he had got the hump because obviously he has been told he has got to play with the reserves.
“I was a young kid wanting to impress. We played and he was just strolling about, you know he didn’t want to be there.
“He was the typical first-team player coming down playing reserves, didn’t want to know and I think I give it to him at half-time.
“I think I said ‘Listen mate if you don’t want to be here just don’t be here, just go, get on your bike.
“And he got up and walked across the room and I’m thinking he’s going to be like ‘yeah, yeah, I know you are right’.
“But he just slapped me in the face. Just a slap not a punch. It was a slap and I just took it like that. I was in shock more than anything.
“Obviously I got up and thought I would have a ruck with him but everyone jumped in, you know that one where you are going ‘let me at him, let me at him’. I could not believe it, just a slap in the face.”