All across the Sunday football leagues in north London, amateur players stood in silence to pay tribute to Abdul-Latif Pouget

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HUNDREDS of footballers bowed their heads this weekend in tribute to a young talented winger who was stabbed to death.

Abdul-Latif Pouget, 20, died in hospital after being found in Back Hill, Clerkenwell earlier this month. Police had been responding to reports of a moped crash when he was discovered with fatal injuries.

He played high-level football for Zaza FC in the Barnet Sunday League that, in tribute to him, organised a minute’s silence in dozens of fixtures on Saturday.

Club secretary Duygu Ozen said: “It was different, it was difficult. We were in mixed emotions we were devastated but proud at the same time.

“The opponents and the referees were touched too. We had a photo of Abdul on the side supporting his team as usual.

“The players walked on to the pitch with a banner then we had the minute of silence some were in tears.

“We have lost 2-1 but these are just numbers. We were on that pitch for a different reason this time.”

In an ITV interview his brother Badruddin Pouget, who lives in Gospel Oak, said that he had “an intense love for football” and would often give “motivational speeches” and was a “very hard working kid”.

The Tribune reported last week how Abdul had been out of action with a long-term injury for several months and was due to make a long-awaited comeback on November 3.

He died in hospital last Monday – three days after being attacked with a knife in Back Hill.

Police had been called to reports of a moped crash.

Zaza FC – which gets its name from a language spoken by Kurdish people in Turkey – was set up to help and educate young people about knife crime. It holds regular events and talks aimed at steering its players away from crime.

Police superintendent Jack Rowlands said: We understand a close-knit community is in shock but we are determined to bring justice for the victim’s loved ones and continue to support the local neighbourhood as best as we can during this difficult time.”

• Oguzcan Dereli, 26, from Islington, who has been charged with Abdul-Latif Pouget’s murder appeared in Highbury magistrates court on October 22.

Baron: Grandson’s death really shows ‘descent of this country’

Abdul-Latif Pouget

THE grandfather of Abdul-Latif Pouget spoke to the Tribune this week about the “very aristocratic” family the 20-year-old descended from – including a city landlord who once “owned most of Charing Cross”, writes Tom Foot.

Baron Robert Pouget said the young man’s great grandfather was George de Vere Drummond, whose land empire had included the Savoy Hotel and Adelphi Theatre and whose other grandson on a different branch of the family tree is Matthew Vaughn, one of the country’s top film producers.

Baron Pouget said that his son Antoine, Abdul’s dad, had brought his own family up in the Muslim faith entirely separated from any trappings of the family dynasty’s inherited wealth and was living in a block in Gospel Oak.

He said: “It is an extraordinary commentary on the way the country is going that you can have somebody descended from one of the richest men in London, only two or three generations away. Massive wealth.

“Then you have this terrible thing happen to his offspring. There is such a contrast between the life he had and his relatives’.”

Baron Pouget said: “His [Antoine’s] great grandfather owned pretty much the whole of Charing Cross. He was immensely wealthy, one of the main landlords of the city. Only two generations later, we have a young boy being murdered in the street.”

The Pouget family has links to the Chateau Pouget, a winery in the Margaux appellation of the Bordeaux region of France – and ran the Castle Pouget for over a century and a half.

Baron Pouget said that he did not know his grandson well but had visited the “stunning” Royal London Hospital in east London where he died with his stick, tweed cap and monocle stuck in my eye.

He said that Abz had been “brought up in the Muslim faith” and “never benefited from wealth of the wider family”, adding: “The British upper classes are funny – they are all split up. That’s how we are.”

He added: “Little ‘Abz’ grandmother was Omega Drummond, the daughter of Captain Drummond. Captain Drummond who was first cousin of the Earl of the Perth, who owned Drummond’s Bank.

“He owned most of Charing Cross, and extremely wealthy family at the turn of the century, right up to the turn of the 1960s.

“He inherited the family fortune after the First World War and managed to get through most of it.

“What was left he gave to his offspring. The one that inherited, George Drummond, is the great-grandfather of young Abz.”

“George Drummond fathered Matthew Vaughn.

“He’s done lots of stuff, a top producer. He married Claudia Schiffer.”

Baron Pouget said he himself had gone into the film industry in Paris before starting businesses in this country in cheese, vegan food, preserves and that he loved to paint.