Football news: Eric Dier was wrong - there will always be idiots in the crowd

It's something that footballers cannot be doing. His family come to football matches and they know there are going to be idiots there who are going to say bad things about their nearest and dearest.

You have to accept that and understand you cannot deal with it. I think it was more just sheer frustration at what is going on at Spurs of late with their performances and their results and that was his way of reacting to it. It's the environment he's in and it has caught hold of him.

He seems quite a mild-mannered person on the pitch so for him to do that tells you there's not a feel-good factor around the club and among the players.

Jose Mourinho's said that players can't do that, but he understood why Dier did it. At the end of the day, some people simply want to turn around and start name-calling or have an opinion on somebody. You can't go around and fight people all the time.

He went into that stand as the aggressor and that is how it will be seen. There are cameras everywhere and you don't know where that footage is going. It does not matter what the supporter has done, even if it is totally out of order, you cannot get involved.

Everyone knows that if family go to games, you can't be their bodyguards. You go out there working and playing for Tottenham, you can't do that for them too.

He didn't do himself any favours at all by the way he has gone back in there reacting like that. The last thing fans want is see their players jumping over chairs trying to get to them. No matter what club you play for, or how popular you are, there's always one idiot that goes against you.

I could have been fighting the world in the '80s and '90s over some of the things people said to me, but it never crossed my mind to go in there because I was never going to win the battle. You're not going to win the war by jumping in and getting in fracas. He must be looking back at that saying 'why did I do that?' There's no good reason for him to do what he did.

Every player gets abused. Look at poor Fred at Manchester United and what he has had to endure.

The team was performing badly and he was only playing occasionally, one game out of five, and was probably not comfortable because he's not getting continuity in his game.

He will have had his frustrations and let go of his cool but instead he kept his composure and came back. If United were to do an award for their most improved player he would win it.

There are a lot more players in worse circumstances than Dier who every week know there is going to be one, a hundred or thousands of people who will pick them out because they're an easy target to do that.

It was one of shock, there were smirks. I'm sure he walked into the dressing room afterwards and everyone looked at him with a bit of shock and a bit of amusement going 'what happened there? Why the hell did you do that?'.