They started queueing five hours in advance when Didier Drogba was signing copies of his new book at Canary Wharf a few days ago. The queue was six deep, stretching back as far as the eye could see, by the time he arrived and it was clearly all a bit much for the woman, in her 20s, who was first in line. Drogba signed her book, flashed his smile and, for a few seconds, she looked as if she might pass out, bursting into tears before wandering off, still crying, somewhere in the direction of Banana Republic. She was from New York and, over and again, she kept repeating the same line. “Finally, I’ve met him.”
Drogba belongs to a small and exclusive band of players, along with Frank Lampard, Gianfranco Zola and one or two others, who can have this effect on Chelsea’s supporters. It doesn’t come easily but there was a point last season when it felt like Diego Costa might be destined for the same form of authentic greatness. Costa was never less than excellent in that period when he introduced himself properly to English football. He was constructed in a way that seemed more in keeping with another age, with a navvy’s shoulders, the charging techniques of a Pamplona bull and a darkness of expression that told us a lot about his complete antipathy towards anyone who tried to stop him.
Costa did also show why, as the Spanish football writer Santi Giménez put it, he “could invade an average‑sized country all by himself”. Yet the good outweighed the bad, even if it was sometimes a close-run thing, and for all the kicks and scratches and elbows, and the impenetrably foul moods for which he has become synonymous, the lingering memory here is what happened when Chelsea went to Manchester City early in his first season and the ball appeared between the club’s new striker and the home team’s captain, Vincent Kompany. It was, I noted at the time, like watching two players “holding their ground like warring old stags”. Neither gave an inch, antlers locked. Then, finally, Kompany emerged with the ball and, however much it goes against pretty much everything we know about him, Costa accepted he had been fairly beaten, held out an appreciative hand and acknowledged his opponent.
Since then, we have probably come to understand a little better why, in Spain, more people were booked for kicking Costa when he played for Atlético Madrid than Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, and why sometimes even his own team-mates had to ask him to stop him embedding his studs into the sides of opponents. It is also a little clearer to everyone, perhaps, why Jorge Valdano described him as “a defender playing up front” and how in the final 15 minutes of one game against Sevilla, two of their players and the assistant coach were sent off, with Costa the common denominator. Valdano, the former sporting director of Real Madrid, played in an Argentina team that could generally handle themselves. “I have never seen a striker kick people so much,” he said.
Equally, this is nothing new. Costa has been bludgeoning opponents since his days in the Brazilian youth system, when he was suspended for four months for slapping a rival across the face. He is one of the few strikers who goes looking for the defenders and, over time, it becomes clear it is more than just a need for conflict. Costa is addicted. Coaches and team-mates have tried to get him to kick the habit. But it’s futile, every time, and when he is scoring goals as freely as he was this time last year it probably doesn’t concern Chelsea greatly that others think of him as the kind of guy who would knife you in the back then have you arrested for carrying an offensive weapon.
But now? In the last 10 months Costa has scored seven goals, picked up six yellow cards and been banned for six games for two charges of violent conduct. He has gone, on average, 356.3 minutes without a goal this season whereas at the corresponding stage last year it was 99.8. Virtually all his other statistics – shots per game, accuracy, sprints, and so on – are down. Then consider the teams his goals came against: Southampton, Hull, Sunderland, West Bromwich, Aston Villa, Norwich and a Maccabi Tel Aviv side that have lost all five of their Champions League games, conceding 15 goals and scoring one.
He is, in short, half the player he was and, yes, it has reached the point where it does seem reasonable that a club with Chelsea’s ambitions are now ringing various agents and asking to be kept in touch about the players who might be better equipped to challenge for Costa’s place than Radamel Falcao – a vanity signing from José Mourinho, if ever there was one – or Loïc Rémy.
Mourinho’s own job may depend on it and, however much they try to laugh it off, it was rare to see a manager and player clashing in the way that happened in Tel Aviv last Tuesday when Costa, for the second game running, would have been left with the near-certainty of a goal if he had anticipated a team-mate’s cross. A year ago, he would have cleared everything in his way to get to the ball. These days, he is drifting to the edges, hanging back and doing everything that would not be expected of a scoring specialist.
The difficult part is establishing what has gone wrong and, to give him his due, that is a question that could be asked of many Chelsea players this season. Eden Hazard has become an elegant frustration. Cesc Fàbregas is not influencing games in the way he once did. Chelsea’s supporters must have found it startling to see the way, for instance, a player of Branislav Ivanovic’s sturdy reliability has suddenly become a danger to his own team, but that malaise has spread throughout the entire side.
Yet Costa is the focal point of that team. It is all geared towards him playing well and Mourinho is right when he said the goal against Norwich last Saturday should not spare him greater scrutiny. “He’s not reading the game properly,” Mourinho said. “As a striker, he must read. You have to play not only when you have the ball, but when others have the ball. You have to anticipate things and read the game faster. Everything is an accumulation [of confidence]. You’re not on fire again just because you’ve scored a winning goal against Norwich.”
Not reading the game? Not anticipating things? Just compare that to what they remember of Costa in Spain or what the Premier League saw of him a year ago. “Every time there was a loose ball in an attacking situation it would seem to rebound to him,” Diego Mainz, his former Albacete team-mate, said. “Always. The first time can be pure luck but when it happens a third, fourth, fifth time you learn that it’s not luck. It’s him.”
Costa is not short of competitive courage but the question has to be asked at this stage about whether his attitude has slipped. His hamstring issues have held him back, undoubtedly, but it is unusual that he has found it so difficult to find a peak level of fitness, when pace was once one of his main assets, and his admission that he was overweight when he returned to pre-season training hardly shifts the suspicion that he does not take enough care of himself.
The same happened more than once at his previous clubs, including Atlético Madrid, where they also noted how when they were running laps Costa tended to be at the back of the pack and stayed in the inside lane because it meant covering a shorter distance. “Blame my mum, she’s far too good a cook,” he said, having turned up four days late and badly out of shape. Madrid’s football journalists remember him trying to avoid the cameras in training and insisting they did not film his whole body.
All that can really be said for certain is that, whatever is troubling Costa, Chelsea desperately need him to shake it out of his system, starting in their game at Tottenham on Sunday. Yet Mourinho sounds like a man who is losing faith in the player who was previously the sharp arrowhead at the tip of his team. He is entitled to be aggrieved and there is no guarantee of a happy ending.
Will leading clubs pass the concussion test?
The Football Association has issued new guidelines about what should happen if players suffer concussion, the standout line being that there ought to be a minimum six-day period of rest at clubs that can provide elite care. “If in doubt, sit them out,” is the slogan, with the recommendation extended to two weeks for under-18s or players with clubs where there are not full-time medics.
In the process, the FA has been liaising with some of the leading experts in brain injuries, one of whom, Dr Willie Stewart, a Glasgow-based neuropathologist, has previously said he felt “depressed, disappointed and dismayed” by the sport’s attitude to concussion.
If you remember what happened to Hugo Lloris a couple of years ago when he was knocked out in a match for Tottenham Hotspur against Everton but allowed to play on once he had come around, it is clear that something had to be done to highlight the potential risks.
Yet these are guidelines, rather than rules, and the test will come when it is meant to be put into practice. The FA has made it clear what should happen but it will be intriguing to see if a Premier League club follows these recommendations should one of their players take a whack, say, on a Sunday with an important match to come the following Saturday. My suspicion is that when the next Lloris-type incident occurs we might find there are one or two clubs who still feel they know better.
