Eric Dier Earned Man Of The Match Despite A Mid-Match Bathroom Break In A Tottenham Win

English football sides are in a tough place right now, as games are happening extremely quickly in an attempt to pack a full season in following last campaign’s COVID-19 hiatus. This has led to a whole lot of matches in a relatively short period of time and some pretty weird things popping up through the first few weeks of the season.

An example of this came on Tuesday afternoon, when Tottenham Hotspur hosted Chelsea in the Carabao Cup just days after both sides played at the weekend. This led to Tottenham turning over much of its starting XI, with an exception being center back Eric Dier, who played 90 minutes on Sunday and followed that up with 90 minutes on Tuesday.

Still, it looked for a moment like Dier might have hit a bump in the road. During the second half against Chelsea with Spurs down 1-0, Dier disappeared for a minute, which led to Spurs manager Jose Mourinho running to the dressing room to figure out what he was doing.

There was, understandably, plenty of speculation that Dier had to go to the bathroom, and after the match, both himself and Mourinho made clear that, yes, nature called and the England international answered.

“Maybe it’s a normal thing when you are completely dehydrated, when you you have nothing in your muscles, which was the case,” Mourinho said. “I knew that he had to go, but I was just trying to put some pressure on him to have him back for the remaining time.”

As for how that went, as Dier alluded to, Chelsea had a chance to score while he was taking care of business, but they came up short. He returned to the pitch, Tottenham’s Erik Lamela scored to draw level soon after, and at the conclusion of the match, things went to penalties. Dier stepped up to the spot first, buried his chance, and Spurs ended up coming out on top in PKs. Dier was named Man of the Match and celebrated accordingly.