Brad Jones reveals Mario Balotelli’s antics during Liverpool training sessions

Rickie Lambert has opened upward about his ill-fated spell at Liverpool, and revealed how Mario Balotelli drove him to distraction with his grooming ground antics at Anfield.

Lambert, a lifelong Red, spent a season with Liverpool after completing a dream – and surprise – switch from Southampton in the summer of 2014.

The striker, who scored close to 250 goals during a remarkable 18-year career, would make 36 appearances for his boyhood club, netting three times. He would also captain the Reds in a League Cup win over Middlesbrough at Anfield.

Merely having failed to hold downwards a regular place - he made just a dozen starts in all competitions - he left for West Brom in July 2015. He retired from playing later a spell at Cardiff in 2017.

What was Lambert's biggest regret?

Speaking to the
Straight From the Off podcast, Kirkby-born Lambert spoke of his joy at being told that Liverpool, who had released him as a xv-year-old, had come in for him 17 years subsequently, but also revealed the biggest error he made after he returned.

He said: “I was in Southampton and my agent rang me and said ‘are you sitting down?’ I was in bed, then I sat up and he said ‘Liverpool are in for you lot’. I merely said ‘f*ck off!’ but he said it was serious. I was like ‘oh my word!’

“I couldn’t tell anyone. My mates nonetheless oasis’t forgiven me! The rumours were getting out, and they were asking if it was right. They obviously couldn’t believe it. It was crazy. It was a dream.”

Lambert added: “My outset pre-flavor, this is one of the biggest mistakes I ever made. [Brendan] Rodgers gave me, Stevie [Gerrard] and the lads at England, I think it was v weeks off, and so we would come back a lot later than everyone else. But I went on holiday with the missus and kids, and then I went back, because I wanted to be in the all-time shape possible playing for Liverpool.

“So I literally had 2 weeks off and and so came back with the first group at Liverpool. And that was a massive mistake. Pretty early on I was thinking ‘f*cking hell’. I could feel it in my legs. I needed the break. Information technology was a stupid mistake.

“I was 32 as well. The twelvemonth earlier at Southampton I could start to feel a slight difference, my picayune yard of pace. Then at Liverpool I just felt leggy, I just didn’t have the energy and the mental attitude that I was in.

“Only I was still raring to get, couldn’t wait for the flavour to offset and thought I was going to striking the ground running, score, do what I’d e'er washed and be a success.”

Lambert's relationship with Balotelli

Lambert is often, and wrongly, cast as the histrion signed to supersede Luis Suarez at Liverpool.

The truth, nevertheless, is that Brendan Rodgers had intended to bring in Alexis Sanchez alongside Lambert, simply for the Chile star to choose a motion to Arsenal instead.

Eventually, after an increasingly desperate summertime search, Rodgers gambled on Balotelli, who arrived from Air-conditioning Milan in a £16 million ($22m) deal.

“He was a adept lad, childish but infectious,” Lambert said of the Italian. “Simply as soon as he stepped on the training pitch he became a different person.

“I’ve never seen anything like it, to be honest. I was at the peak of my time as a professional, so to come beyond him was but…

“At start, he gave everything when he played. Merely in training, I could tell he wasn’t giving his all. He was answering Brendan back and my head went with that.

“The fact that he was playing in forepart of me didn’t bother me at first, I idea ‘I’ll get myself in’ but just seeing the style he was in training, and then he was playing, information technology did affect me a little bit.

“My head went with him in training and I had to get in and say to Brendan ‘don’t put me on his team again’. I think Stevie had said the same.

“His head would just go. If it wasn’t going his mode, he would just ruin the session basically. He’d kick the ball away, score an ain goal.

“I was speaking to Joe Hart and the lads at England and they were similar ‘he was like that at City’. I’d ask them ‘how did he get away with it?’. They but shook their heads.”

‘I knew I’d f*cked it up’

It took Lambert 12 games to open his Reds account, though his goal at Crystal Palace came in just his third league get-go.

But he remembers the solar day he knew things were not going to work out for him at Liverpool vividly.

“Nosotros played Basel at home, and I was terrible,” he said. “I couldn’t really feel my legs, I didn’t take the little burst I’d had my whole career. We were 1-0 down at half-time, we needed a goal and he brought me off.

“I kind of knew ‘I’ve f*cked this upward here’. I deserved to go brought off, and I was gutted.”

He added: “Shortly later on, Brendan pulled me and said ‘[Alan] Pardew has come in for yous’. He was the Crystal Palace manager at the time. This was December, and he said ‘I think you should go in January, because I can’t hope you any game time here’.

“I didn’t really call up about it. I said ‘I’ve left Southampton to join Liverpool, and you desire me to join Crystal Palace after v months?! Why would I practice that?’

“I basically told him no, and I didn’t play and so. He changed the system, played Sterling up top and I literally didn’t touch the ball for about 3-and-a-one-half months. That was a actually tough time. Aston Villa came in at the cease of January and I was very close to joining, but I always thought ‘I’ll turn this circular’. But with not playing, my fitness was getting worse and worse, and I couldn’t affect anything.

“I knew I was out the door before the end of the season. I didn’t desire to be a burden to Liverpool. I was gutted that information technology didn’t piece of work out, simply I didn’t want to be on the books, sitting in the stand. That wasn’t me. So as soon as the season finished, I was sorting my movement out.”

Further reading

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