Roy Hodgson now claims Wilfried Zaha was a ‘nuisance’ in Crystal Palace training
Roy Hodgson now claims Wilfried Zaha was a ‘nuisance’ in Crystal Palace training
Crystal Palace manager Roy Hodgson has now surprisingly revealed that club legend Wilfried Zaha hated squad training sessions.
Zaha, who joined Galatasaray this summer, is one of the club’s best-ever players, and was a dream for any Crystal Palace manager to have on the pitch, but it has now emerged that he was far from the best when it came to training.
Hodgson has revealed that whilst Zaha was a top-class player and a crucial figure for Palace over the years, he simply did not enjoy training during the week.
Hodgson reveals Zaha’s training frustrations
Speaking on the Five Year Plan Podcast, Hodgson admitted that Zaha would not train well, but was a leader when it came to turning up on the pitch.
“He did take on enormous burden when it came to getting us goals, that’s the bottom line,” Hodgson stated of Zaha.
“I wouldn’t say that Wilf was a leader on the training ground, I think Wilf was a leader when he got onto the field of play because he’s a footballer, he wants to play.
“The thing about Wilf is that he didn’t get injured very often, he didn’t miss training sessions.
“He could be a nuisance in the training sessions because he was moaning at the others, or unhappy that people didn’t reach his quality all the time, but we had other leaders, we were very lucky to have had other leaders.
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“If you said to Wilf, ‘are you enjoying these training sessions,’ he would have said no, because he really wanted to do the type of training session that he liked to do, but luckily the others tempered any real criticisms he might have had, and he got on with it and did well.”
Zaha was the club’s talisman for years, and carried the goalscoring burden on his back a lot at times. The pressure he faced to deliver was higher than anyone else in the team, and he would constantly deliver.
What he lacked in training, he made up for on the pitch, and this does not necessarily make him less professional in his approach to his career.
Zaha was rarely injured for long periods, and had outstanding fitness when it came to playing in attacking roles whilst also receiving heavy fouling from the opposition.
The winger’s talent was clear when he played, and he has been missed this season. Whilst Hodgson has revealed what Zaha was like in training, he ended up delivering when it mattered on the pitch for Palace, and his way of working was clearly successful for him.
