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Goals, gamesmanship and golf carts: Why Chelsea and the rest of the Premier League will so miss Diego Costa

The Brazilian-born Spaniard was never the hate figure he appeared to be on the pitch

Miguel Delaney
Chief Football Writer
Friday 22 September 2017 14:43 BST
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Costa was very popular among his teammates
Costa was very popular among his teammates

Every time Diego Costa made the headlines for flashpoints rather than goals, ex-players and opposing managers would be all too willing to criticise… but one question was always what current players actually thought.

It was one of the curiosities of the Spanish international’s colourful Premier League career: what was the opinion of his fellow professionals? Was he a hate-figure within the game in the same way he was to so many watching on?

The answer is no. Bar the odd public barb, and obvious bite-backs when he did something on the pitch, Costa was not really unpopular. He just wasn’t talked about among players in the way he was among everyone else.

That was because he was talked about in a different way, because he was one of those blokes who other players couldn’t help spread stories about when on international duty. The stories of his antics were that popular, meaning Costa was that popular, too. “You’ll never guess what he’s done now…”

One of the milder latest stories was how he would always be spying out for when any of the Chelsea staff would leave their keys in the little golf-style buggies they use to get around the Cobham training ground complex. If they did - and that was pretty frequent - it was bingo. The staff would find their buggy parked in a ditch, and Costa laughing away to himself somewhere else.

He never really did master English but it didn’t matter because, in the words of one staff-member, “if there was a bit of light-hearted mischief to be had, he was front and centre”.

He never completely mastered some of his teammates’ names, either, so it only added to the hilarity that he would invent some pretty creative nicknames for them to get around that.

Costa was always the centre of trouble at Cobham

The bottom line was that, unlike on the actual pitch, he was involved in a lot of hilarity. He was just so distinctive, so different - but also something of a throwback to the type of figure that has been missing in the homogenised hermetically sealed modern game. He was “a character”.

This is not to condone or excuse some of his on-pitch controversies, even if it should be remembered that he was remarkably only red-carded once during a three-year period in England. He could be responsible for downright nasty things, and when off scoring form often seemed more interested in disrupting play as much as making it. but that points to another valuable football mindset. Costa was said to be like someone such as Pepe, in that he would do whatever it took to win on the pitch… but would very definitively leave it there. This was also another reason that he was never that unpopular in the Premier League. Players respected that in him.

Others of course revelled in what he brought.

That type of abrasiveness fed into what often felt a slightly rougher-edged style of play, and another reason why the Premier League will miss. Costa just brought something different to the pitch. If he wasn’t quite going to do something you couldn’t imagine in the way Dimitri Payet could - although some of the Spanish striker’s goals were genuinely excellent and creative, not least those at West Brom or Middlesbrough last season - he did just open up games; offer the kind of chaos that enlivened matches.

He was something different, and brought colour.

That is also of course exactly why he’s leaving. That kind of abrasiveness could mean, according to one who knew him, “he was often a nightmare to manage”.

If it wasn’t quite a case of Costa just doing whatever he wanted, it could be difficult to get him to do exactly what a manager wanted. He was erratic in that sense, someone that could really only be facilitated or ‘handled’ rather than controlled. You could only try and guide those instincts, that made him at different times so problematic for both the opposition and his own team.

With two league titles when he scored so many key goals, Chelsea probably got the best out of him. You can already see that they will miss his ability to produce something out of nothing. So will the Premier League, because he so often produced something different.

Costa just made the competition more colourful.

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