Willy Caballero backs Chelsea team-mate N’Golo Kante over training absence after ‘bad time’ with coronavirus symptoms
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CHELSEA keeper Willy Caballero has backed team-mate N’Golo Kante over his Covid-19 fears.
The midfielder was given permission to skip training last week and has been told he can miss the rest of the season should he continue to feel uncomfortable.
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Kante lost a brother to a heart attack just weeks before the 2018 World Cup and a few months earlier he himself fainted in training before being given a clean bill of health.
Argentine shot-stopper Caballero has just signed a one-year contract extension after deputising well for first choice keeper Kepa Arrizabalaga when he was axed by Frank Lampard.
The 38-year-old told TNT Sports he understood Kante's concerns in an Instagram Live interview, saying: “It’s very understandable.
“He tested negative for Covid-19 but he had a bad time of it during quarantine with symptoms of the virus that gave him that fear.
“We respect him and we’ll wait until he feels comfortable because the truth is that to do what we’re doing you have to feel okay and feel confidence and after we start again, we have to all go forward together.
“N’Golo is a very humble and hard-working person who is always smiling and and he must have his reasons to lift up his hand and say what he’s said.
“We did a lot of Zoom meetings with Frank Lampard and the other players and he said he didn’t feel safe going back to training because of the way he had felt over the last few weeks.
"We know he’s someone who loves training and running and is incapable of lying about something like this.
"We support him and we respect him.”
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The former Man City keeper also admitted in his interview with the Argentinian sports channel that Premier League footballers had to be ready for possible salary cuts if matches had to be played behind closed doors next season.
He said: “The owners of the Premier League sides are like in the NBA, they’re not millionaires, they’re billionaires.
“They could say, ‘We’ll cut budgets’ or they could say ‘We won’t cut anything’ because we don’t need to.
“But perhaps that will change next year in the Premier if the decision is that we have to play next season without fans.
“Some clubs including Chelsea won’t be able to carry on paying the same as they are now and will have to sit down with many players like me and propose things.”
Asked if he was prepared for that possibility, he said: “Yes, it’s a situation that could affect all of us, and we all have to be open to listening to the proposal.”
Caballero, who signed for Chelsea from Man City in July 2017, also had kind words for former bosses Manuel Pellegrini and Pep Guardiola.
Of the Chilean he said: “Manuel is first and foremost a gentleman.
“He was always very loyal and very fair.”
He recalled how Pellegrini told him after keeping him in goal for the 2016 League Cup final against Liverpool and resisting pressure to use first-choice keeper Joe Hart instead.
Pellegrini said: “I prefer to lose a title than go back on my word."
Caballero added: “He kept me in goal and we won the cup,
“What he said has stayed with me. He had given me his word he was going to keep me in goal for the whole of the competition and that’s what he did.
“I only have good things to say about Manuel.”
In his warts-n-all chat with TNT Sports which lasted nearly an hour, he said of Pep Guardiola: “It was like going to university with him.
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“Every day you learn something new. If it’s not on the pitch, it’s when you’re watching videos.
“The good thing is that he doesn’t have problems with teaching a first-choice player or a substitute, a person who was 34 as I was then, or a youngster aged 18.
“He’s a very good teacher and he’s very good at correcting you.”