Yesterday marked exactly one year on from Maurizio Sarri’s Chelsea team winning the Europa League, thrashing Arsenal 4-1 in Baku.
It marked the end of a very strange season at Chelsea, but winning a major trophy really summed it up.
We all knew by then that Sarri was off; Chelsea was not for him, and he was not for Chelsea.
Despite unfair criticism of the Italian who was pretty much written off by many fans early doors, something just never felt right during his reign at the club.
Players seemed to be miffed, and reports grew about some of them disliking training, and Sarri’s style of play.
Sarri’s Assistant Head Coach at the time, Gianfranco Zola, has pretty much confirmed these concerns in his latest interview yesterday, as reported by Sky Sports.
He has confirmed that some player found the training sessions “boring”, and key players such as Willian and Eden Hazard were “suffering”.
Zola said:
“At the beginning the players were very much behind everything that we were saying, they were brilliant.
“They were following everything, but then as the weeks passed due to the repetition and the amount of games they were playing, the players got tired and they also got bored in a way.
“But boring is part of our job. Sometimes you need to get bored but when you get bored you persist in what you’re doing and you get better.
“I remember that when I was learning to play football, kicking a ball for example, I used to do it 300-400 times a day at least.
“There were moments when I got tired but I needed to do it repeatedly because if I wanted it to become a part of me, this was the process I needed to go through.
“They were talented players, like Hazard and Willian, players who know how to win games on their own, but they were suffering from the type of exercises and type of training we were doing – but it was necessary for the others.
“I’ll be honest, they were brilliant because they got bored, but they kept doing it throughout and that was the reason why when everyone was dropping we were going up towards the end.”
