Rickie Lambert on Mario Balotelli's Training Chaos at Liverpool
Rickie Lambert had to ask Brendan Rodgers to keep him away from Mario Balotelli in training at Liverpool – after the Italian began deliberately smashing own goals past his own goalkeeper when he lost interest.
Lambert, 44, returned to Anfield in the summer of 2014, the romantic homecoming after Luis Suárez’s explosive exit to Barcelona. Liverpool needed a new forward line. Rodgers turned to two very different characters: Lambert, the boyhood Red desperate to prove he finally belonged, and Balotelli, the mercurial talent already infamous for treating football like a playground.
The contrast quickly became impossible to ignore.
“Don’t put me on his team again”
Speaking on the Straight From the Off podcast in 2021, Lambert lifted the lid on what Balotelli was really like behind closed doors.
“He was a good lad, childish but infectious,” Lambert said. “But as soon as he stepped on the training pitch he became a different person.
“I’ve never seen anything like it, to be honest. At first, he gave everything when he played. But in training, I could tell he wasn’t giving his all. He was answering Brendan [Rodgers] back and my head went with that.
“The fact that he was playing in front of me didn’t bother me at first, I thought ‘I’ll get myself in’ but just seeing the way he was in training, and then he was playing, it did affect me a little bit.”
The situation reached the point where Lambert felt he had to intervene for his own sanity.
“My head went with him in training and I had to go in and say to Brendan, ‘Don’t put me on his team again’. I think Stevie [Gerrard] had said the same.”
When senior pros start making that kind of request, something is badly wrong.
Balotelli’s “jaw-dropping” own goals
Reports from the time back Lambert’s frustration. In August 2015, shortly before Balotelli headed back to AC Milan on loan, The Standard detailed one training-ground moment that left team-mates stunned.
During a 10-v-10 game at Melwood, with Balotelli on the weaker side – largely made up of likely substitutes ahead of a weekend clash with Arsenal – his irritation boiled over. Instead of chasing the game, he picked up the ball around halfway and unleashed a “jaw-dropping” strike.
It flew straight into the net.
The problem? It was past his own reserve goalkeeper, Brad Jones.
It was the kind of outrageous finish that would have gone viral had it been at the right end. Instead, it became a symbol of a player whose emotions and impulses so often overruled professionalism.
Balotelli’s numbers at Liverpool told their own story. Just four goals in 28 appearances, a fleeting, frustrating spell before he was moved on to Nice in 2016. A career that had once promised to dominate Europe instead kept circling back to the same question: talent or temperament?
A boyhood dream collides with chaos
For Lambert, the timing could hardly have been more cruel. This was the kid released by Liverpool as a schoolboy, who had grafted his way back up through the lower leagues to finally pull on the red shirt again.
He wanted intensity. He wanted standards. He wanted to prove, every single day, that he deserved to be there.
Sharing a forward line in training with a team-mate who would casually lash the ball into his own net from 50 yards when the mood took him? That cut deep.
That refusal – or sheer inability – to rein in his emotions ended up defining Balotelli’s Liverpool stint and, in many ways, his entire career. For Lambert, battling his own form and pressure at his boyhood club, it was one circus act too many.
