Sevilla defender Adil Rami reveals ‘crazy’ Southampton boss Claude Puel could cause ‘flashpoints’ while manager at Lille and would elbow him if he was losing a race
The France defender was given his big break at Lille in 2007 by the former Monaco midfield enforcer he remembers fondly as a fierce force
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SAINTS boss Claude Puel can be a “crazy” training ground sinner according to former player and big fan Adil Rami.
The Southampton boss gave the Sevilla ace his debut in 2007 when they were at Lille and the defender remembers a different man to the mild-mannered boss at St Mary's.
When Arsene Wenger won the French title with Monaco in 1988 he did with Puel as his midfield enforcer.
And the Arsenal boss revealed when Puel moved to the Premier League in the summer that his ex-player loved a tackle and was a “fighter”.
And now Rami, who faces Leicester in Wednesday night’s Champions League clash, has revealed the 55-year-old kept his bite when he followed Wenger into management.
Rami said: “Claude Puel likes players who are hungry, who run all day, never stop talking, never let their arms drop.
“Puel himself is like that — he’s a little bit crazy.
“At Lille, he did everything we did.
“He went running with us, worked out with us, played with us in training.
“Sometimes, there were flashpoints — you have no idea.
“He’d put a tackle in, we’d tackle him, and sometimes it ended in a punch-up. He is very, very strong.
“He runs all the time, and if we ever did a fitness test, I had to wait until the last 200 metres to overtake him, because otherwise he would elbow me.”
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Rami himself is no soft touch. He graduated from a broken home, to tough non-league football and a job as a road sweeper, to become a France international.
The centre-back was rejected until he was 20 and even when he got his first contract he pleaded with the local council to keep his job open in case he failed.
He revealed: “My mother did everything to find me a job.
"She had four children all to herself. My father wandered the streets, he couldn’t keep off drugs.
“Every day I worked from five in the morning to 12.30 and, in the afternoon, I went to my football club in Frejus. For me it was simply a pleasure, not a job.
"Now I think maybe I was luckier than the kids who came through the academies.
"Today, it makes me gasp when I think of the prospect of being shut up in an academy at 15 years old to learn football, football, football.
"And to have that pressure of wondering whether you’re going to succeed or not."