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Payet out of Hazard’s shadow
- Updated: August 12, 2016
Eden Hazard and Dimitri Payet spent a season together at Lille in 2011/12. Hazard was the star back then, but when the pair face each other for Chelsea and West Ham respectively on Monday Night Football, it will be as Premier League equals, writes Adam Bate.
Dimitri Payet’s difficult beginnings in football are well known. Kicked out of Le Havre as a teenager, he was sent back to his home in Reunion, 5700 miles away in the Indian Ocean. It wasn’t to be the end of Payet’s career – or his disciplinary problems.
Given another opportunity with Nantes, he stormed out of a 2007 training session after a row with senior goalkeeper Fabien Barthez. At Saint-Etienne in 2010, Payet struck his own captain, Blaise Matuidi, during a home defeat to Toulouse.
He went missing soon after in the hope of forcing through a transfer to Paris St Germain. “He made a blunder,” said Saint-Etienne president Roland Romeyer at the time. “What kid hasn’t made a mistake?” But Payet made more than most.
Flash forward six years and the West Ham man is a hero for club and country, named in the PFA Premier League team of the year and the Euro 2016 team of the tournament. At 29, he’s now playing the best football of his career.
A late bloomer then, but one whose talent was never hidden. Payet’s France debut had come at the age of 23, providing assists in each of his first two appearances. Damien Comolli, sporting director during Payet’s stay at Saint-Etienne, hinted that any issues were in the mind.
“On a natural class level, Dimitri is stronger than a player like Luka Modric, who I saw very closely at Tottenham,” Comolli told France Football in 2010. “It is a very high level. We never stopped repeating to him: ‘It is only up to you.'”
It was this Payet, not the hero of France whose goal lit up the opening night of the Euros, who pitched up at Lille in 2011. The club were newly-crowned as the champions of France, winners for the first time in 50 years thank to the precocious gifts of Eden Hazard.
Lille supporters might …
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