Rickie Lambert's Frustration with Mario Balotelli at Liverpool
Rickie Lambert had to be kept away from Mario Balotelli on the training pitch at Liverpool – because the Italian forward was so infuriating that he started scoring own goals on purpose.
Lambert returned to Anfield in the summer of 2014, the local lad coming home after Luis Suárez’s blockbuster move to Barcelona. Brendan Rodgers rebuilt his attack that window and rolled the dice on Balotelli, then 24, as the wild-card replacement.
The contrast between the two strikers could not have been starker.
Lambert, 32 at the time, treated every session like an audition. Released by Liverpool as a teenager, he was desperate to prove he finally belonged at the club he’d supported as a boy. Balotelli arrived with a very different reputation – prodigiously talented, but notorious for treating football, and especially training, as something of a joke.
That split quickly surfaced at Melwood.
Speaking on the Straight From the Off podcast in 2021, Lambert painted a vivid picture of Balotelli’s double life.
"He was a good lad, childish but infectious," Lambert recalled. "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 issue wasn’t just attitude. It was selection. Balotelli kept his place. Lambert watched on.
"The fact that he was playing in front of me didn’t bother me at first, I thought ‘I’ll get myself in’," Lambert said. "But just seeing the way he was in training, and then he was playing, it did affect me a little bit."
The tension 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’. I think Stevie [Gerrard] had said the same."
Balotelli’s behaviour wasn’t just winding up senior pros. It was leaving the whole training ground stunned.
By August 2015, as Liverpool prepared to send him back to AC Milan on loan, a report in The Standard backed up Lambert’s version of events. One episode stuck out: during a 10 vs 10 game, Balotelli, frustrated and stuck on the weaker side – largely made up of fringe players ahead of a league game against Arsenal – picked up the ball around halfway and lashed a "jaw-dropping" strike.
It flew straight into his own net, past reserve goalkeeper Brad Jones.
The technique was outrageous. The intent was not. It was an act of protest, not brilliance.
Moments like that came to define Balotelli’s short, chaotic spell at Anfield. The raw ability that had once lit up Inter Milan and Manchester City never truly surfaced on Merseyside. He finished with just four goals in 28 appearances before Liverpool cut their losses and sent him to Nice in 2016.
Lambert, meanwhile, was fighting his own battle. Back at the club he loved, trying to turn a dream into a lasting role, he found himself sharing a pitch in training with a teammate who seemed determined to sabotage the very standards he valued.
Balotelli’s refusal – or perhaps inability – to rein in his emotions and treat every session with the same seriousness as a match did not just derail his Liverpool career. It left those around him exasperated, and for players like Lambert, it turned a homecoming into a far more complicated story.
