Sunday, May 23, 2021

Tottenham hotel was visited by police before infamous ‘Lasagne-gate’ incident which allowed Arsenal to win top-four race on final day of 2005/06 season, recalls Michael Dawson

May 23, 2021 - Tags : fixtures , Football - news , IFTTT , pictures , scores , transfers

Michael Dawson recalled how he felt ‘drained’ and ‘washed out’ just hours before one of the most important matches of his career.

The ex-Tottenham defender was feeling like this through no fault of his own as a dodgy lasagne at the hotel that he and his teammates stayed at led to him and other members of the squad getting a bad dose of food poisoning with Champions League qualification on the line.

It was a traumatic 24 hours for Tottenham’s class of 2006

A win over West Ham at Upton Park on the final day of the 2005/06 season would have secured fourth spot for Spurs, but the task was made a whole lot harder…

“Saturday night we went to a hotel in Canary Wharf and WOW, late Saturday night and early hours of Sunday morning I was rough along with five or six other players,” Dawson told talkSPORT Breakfast.

“Back then it wasn’t like it is now when you’re in a hotel before every single game and it wasn’t even an early kick-off.

“I remember we had our evening meal, I went back to my room and I think at about 10/11 o’clock I’m thinking ‘wow, I feel rough!’ I phoned the wife up to tell her I hadn’t got any sleep and then an hour later I phoned her up again and I’m really, really ill, sick.

It seems Dawson wasn’t the only one who felt unwell

“I thought ‘I’m going to be struggling to play the next day’. I didn’t want to phone the physio or doc but it got to 4 o’clock and I was really ill again so I phoned them. They both came down and I was like ‘I’m struggling, I don’t know how I’m going to play’.

“I remember saying that I didn’t think I’d be the only person who’d fall ill. I went for a walk in the morning and I felt washed up, drained. I wasn’t the only one, there were five or six of us really struggling.

“The police came round to the hotel. This is a major thing as Champions League was at stake and all of a sudden six or seven of us are going down.

“They said they might delay the game by an hour but I thought I’d need about three days to get over this!”

The clash in east London went ahead as normal and Dawson started but Spurs didn’t get the result they needed as they lost 2-1. The defeat was made a whole lot worse by the fact Arsenal pipped Spurs to fourth with a win at home to Wigan.

“We turned up and we didn’t perform and I was one of them who had a nightmare of a game,” Dawson added.

“There were players coming in in the morning who hadn’t been involved all season – you’d have been better off playing them because we had no energy. I remember Michael Carrick coming off early in the second half and just completely washed out.

“It was devastating. Anyone can lose a game, we may have lost the game, we’ll never know but to not be on a level playing field was tough to take.”