Diego Costa has announced that he is ready to return to Chelsea first team action in the Premier League, after nearly a month on the sidelines.
Saturday’s game against strugglers, Aston Villa, at Stamford Bridge will be his first in the league since being banned for three matches for violent conduct following the tussle with Arsenal’s Laurent Koscielny on 19th September.
Costa has only played competitively once since then, which was away at FC Porto in the Champions League. In addition, he was dropped by Spain coach Vicente del Bosque for their European Championship qualifiers against Luxembourg and Ukraine.
Costa Set to Return
The controversial striker has spent this period on the sidelines working with fitness coaches at Chelsea’s Cobham training base. He admitted, prior to the international break, that he had returned to pre-season carrying an extra bit of weight that has led to his slow start to the season.
He told reporters at last week’s media conference:
‘I got injured at the end of the season and then I went on holiday. Maybe I got out of my diet and when I came back I was not the way I was supposed to be. I was a little bit overweight, and that affected my game. I’m going to be very honest, five or six weeks ago, I was not on top of my game.’
Since then, he has been working hard and doing additional sessions to get the fitness and sharpness back that made him such a feared force in the Premier League during Chelsea’s prior campaign.
Speaking with Chelsea’s in-house TV channel ahead of the weekend’s fixture with Aston Villa, he said:
‘Having almost a month off has been important for me. I have been able to train with my own specific schedule to help me get better and better.
‘The sessions have been good and I have been able to benefit from being here. I have been working on what I needed to work on and I am happy about that.’
What Chelsea and boss, José Mourinho, need most are a resurgent Costa and a return to winning ways. Their poor form has been subject to a lot of intense scrutiny from both fans and the media, with observers trying to fathom how Chelsea have gone from ‘champions’ to ‘chumps’ in the space of just five months. The volume of top professionals in the squad out of form has stumped pundits, but Costa believes they can turn it around.
‘When things don’t go the way everyone expects, people always look for someone to blame. In some cases they [media] blame the players, but in this case they blame the manager and maybe that’s because it is Mourinho. I have seen sides losing more games than Chelsea, and no one criticises their managers. ‘You can be selfish and blame it on the manager but I’m not going to do that. I’m responsible and so are the other guys. We need to blame the players.
‘We know we were not 100 per cent when we got here. We came back from holiday very confident, and thought we could go back into how it was last season. When we actually realised where we were, the team was already in a bad situation. They can say whatever they want about Mourinho, but inside the dressing room, he is completely different from the idea people have of him.
‘He gives us all the support we need, and the players talk to each other and we say he is the best manager you can have. Maybe he gets criticised because he’s very good. Maybe he gets criticised because he’s Mourinho.’
The most important thing for Diego Costa is to come back, hit the ground running and score goals. If he proves to be more of a danger to the goal than he is to the oppositions’ centre-backs, then Chelsea should be in line for a march up the table and a return to fortress Stamford Bridge.
All quotes were sourced via the Daily Mail; the remainder of Diego Costa’s thoughts and the original article can be read here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-3265374/Diego-Costa-admits-overweight-start-season-Chelsea-striker-backs-underfire-boss-Jose-Mourinho.html
Main Photo
