Rickie Lambert on Training with Mario Balotelli at Liverpool
Rickie Lambert reveals he begged Liverpool not to pair him with Mario Balotelli in training – after the Italian started smashing in deliberate own goals when he lost interest.
The former England striker returned to Anfield in 2014, a romantic homecoming after Luis Suárez’s explosive departure to Barcelona. Brendan Rodgers rebuilt his forward line that summer, drafting in Lambert, then 32, and the mercurial Balotelli, eight years his junior, to lead a revamped Liverpool attack.
The contrast in mentality could hardly have been sharper.
Lambert, who had been released by Liverpool as a schoolboy, treated every session as an audition to prove he finally belonged. Balotelli arrived with a reputation from Manchester City and Inter Milan as a footballing maverick who rarely treated training with the same seriousness as matchday.
It quickly became obvious which version Liverpool were getting.
Balotelli never truly ignited on Merseyside. He scored just four goals in 28 appearances before the club offloaded him to Nice in 2016, another fleeting stop in a career defined as much by chaos as talent. He is now with Al-Ittifaq in the UAE, far from the glare of the Premier League spotlight that once followed his every move.
Lambert, speaking on the Straight From the Off podcast in 2021, painted a vivid picture of life alongside the Italian.
“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 tension eventually boiled over.
“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’,” Lambert admitted. “I think Stevie [Gerrard] had said the same.”
That wasn’t just a senior pro losing patience. It was a dressing room struggling to process a teammate who could treat sessions like a playground.
A report in The Standard in August 2015, just before Balotelli’s loan return to AC Milan, underlined why tempers frayed. During a 10-v-10 training game, largely involving fringe players ahead of a league clash with Arsenal, Balotelli’s frustration boiled over. Stationed on the weaker side, he picked up the ball around halfway and unleashed a “jaw-dropping” strike.
The problem? He rifled it past his own keeper, reserve stopper Brad Jones.
It was audacious, technically brilliant – and utterly infuriating. Team-mates and staff looked on, stunned, as Balotelli turned a competitive session into a personal protest.
Moments like that came to define his Liverpool spell. He struggled, or simply refused, to rein in his emotions, veering from gifted match-winner to exasperating sideshow in the space of a week. For Lambert, fighting his own battle to make good on a boyhood dream, those antics were impossible to ignore.
Liverpool moved Balotelli on. Lambert’s own Anfield story never fully caught fire either. But the memory that lingers from that short, strange era is of a striker so talented he could score from halfway on demand – and so volatile he chose to do it into the wrong net.
