Former Chelsea assistant manager Gianfranco Zola has given the inside track on exactly what happened between Kepa Arrizabalaga and Maurizio Sarri in Wembley in February.
You’ll remember it well, with Kepa flat-out refusing to leave the field, even though Sarri had ordered that Willy Caballero be introduced in place of the Spanish goalkeeper.
Sarri lost his temper and at one point looked as though he was set to storm down the tunnel in rage, but appeared to think better of it and subsequently returned to the dugout.
Everyone viewing the game watched on in amazement, but none more so than those inside Sarri’s technical area on the day, one of which was his assistant Gianfranco Zola.
Zola has now given his side of the story and attempted to give further insight into the astonishing events at Wembley. The Italian is quoted by the Express saying:
“At the beginning, he misunderstood. He was pretending he was injured because he wanted to waste time, nothing really wrong. Then we made some consideration. We knew we had Caballero on the bench and he knew all the Manchester City players. It was an opportunity for us. We were going to make the change.
It wasn’t pre-arranged but he was injured the day before and we thought it was the injury coming back. We had an opportunity because Caballero knows the Manchester City players. It was not an easy opportunity to deal with, we could not believe it.
We were speechless, we kept telling him to come off but he didn’t. We could have dealt with it better, probably, maybe the skipper could have said to him to come to the sideline.”
It was an absolute shambles of a situation which, in truth, epitomised Sarri’s season in charge of Chelsea. Everyone appears to be in much better spirits under Frank Lampard.
