On This Day – 16th February
Never one to shy away from the tabloid headlines, Stan Collymore made front page news for all of the wrong reasons on this day back in 2000.
Collymore had only been at the club for a week, having joined from Aston Villa for £ million. The transfer was timed to perfection for him as his new club Leicester City had a mid-season break arranged at the La Manga resort in Spain.
Collymore travelled out with his new club Leicester City to La Manga and made the trip a trip never to be forgotten.
Less than 24 hours after arriving at the resort, Leicester City’s party had been thrown out and banned from their Hyatt Regency Hotel.
Apparently the hotel takes a dim view of spraying 40 of their guests with a fire extinguisher after a few hours drinking with your new team mates.
The former England man wasn’t entirely repentant for his actions and was quoted at the time as saying:
“Maybe in the circumstances I will hold up my hands and say it was naivety but at the end of the day I haven’t killed anybody”.
Collymore was given a club-record fine of £30,000 for his childish antics and his new boss Martin O’Neill wasn’t done with him yet.
O’Neill ordered his new striker to take party in six months of Community Service. This involved visits to schools, hospitals and elderly people’s homes.
In his early career ‘Stan the Man’ had been hotly-pursued by many of the top managers of the time and looked to be the next big thing.
Sadly, controversy never seemed to be far away and the prodigious talent turned into another potential great whose talent fell by the way-side.
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