“Lets have it” – Chelsea player admits to there being “real, proper fights during training” | OneFootball

A Chelsea player has admitted to there being real and proper fights during training in some quotes picked up on today.

The news comes after Chelsea played out a boring 0-0 draw against Brentford in the Premier League on Sunday afternoon in what was another underwhelming performance.

EXCLUSIVE! Chelsea ARE looking to sign a new goalkeeper this summer and have world class name on the table!! 👀

Enzo Maresca frustrated Chelsea fans once again with a heavily rotated starting lineup in such an important game in the race for Champions League qualification, and then he annoyed them even more with some of the excuses he came out with after the game, even blaming the weather!

The Blues boss was also frustrated though, pointing out the fact that his attackers are currently not doing enough and has called for more goals from them all.

Maresca and his players must keep going now and onto the next game tonight in the Conference League as they look to try and win some silverware this season.

But back to these fights and luckily, they are not recent happenings and they actually happened under Chelsea’s most successful era so far!

Mikel admits to Chelsea players fighting

Former Chelsea midfielder John Obi Mikel has opened up on how tempers would regularly flare at the training during his successful spell at the club.

“Our training was intense,” Mikel said on The High Performance podcast. “There was two or three players in every position. You know straight away that if you don’t play well you’re out of the first XI. So the competition was always there.

“In training, the tackles would be flying in, [some] players think ‘if I get you injured then I’m going to be the one who’s playing’. I don’t think that’s what it was but the tackles were flying in, there were fights happening during training.

“There were real, proper fights during training. I remember Michael Ballack had a fight with Salomon Kalou. Salomon Kalou was a very quiet guy, lovely boy, but Michael Ballack must have done something [to him] that day. He went off.

“We don’t know what happened but Michael Ballack must have done something that’s got Salomon Kalou to go off,” he added. “Proper fight. They had to be separated, had to be pulled away.

Mikel remembered Kalou being too livid to talk before storming off. Yet, the 37-year-old noted that the coaching staff actually liked seeing players stand their ground with each other, as long as they kept it together come game day, reports The Daily Star.

When quizzed about his own tussles during training, Mikel confessed that not speaking the same language once led to a dust-up with Florent Malouda in a rondo exercise. “When you give a bad pass, sometimes you’re trying to set someone up to get smashed,” he said.

“Florent Malouda spoke French, I think to Didier Drogba, and said ‘give him a short pass because I want to smash him’. So Didier laid a short pass and I went for it and got absolutely hammered. I jumped up and we both went at it. Carlo Ancelotti was standing there and he rushed in and we got separated.”

But the most infamous training ground scrap was between Andriy Shevchenko and Tal Ben Haim, according to Mikel.

“There were so many fights,” Mikel said. “I remember one with Tal Ben Haim and Andriy Shevchenko, but I think Tal Ben Haim got knocked out properly. Again, [Shevchenko was] somebody who never spoke. You would never hear Shevchenko say a word, but it just shows the competitiveness.

“That’s what got us going. We had bad times during the season, you come in and everybody’s grumpy. The manager’s trying to find a way to get back to winning ways, chopping and changing, and you are not playing and don’t know why. Everyone’s in a bad mood, things are not going well for us.

“Then you come to training and someone’s trying to bully you? No, you have to stand up for yourself. That’s what happened time and time again.”