Terry reflects on Zola influence at Chelsea

While he may not be the most popular figure off the pitch, few can deny Chelsea skipper John Terry’s talent as a defender.

But the 35-year-old Blues stalwart admits he would not be the wall he is without an unlikely mentor – Gianfranco Zola.

This week marked 20 years since the extraordinary Italian signed for Chelsea, and the south-west Londoners are certainly an entirely different beast now from that day having collected countless titles since Roman Abramovich’s Russian revolution in June 2003.

Zola’s performance in the final game of the 2002/03 season against Liverpool was one of the reasons Abramovich decided to buy the club, and his brilliance on the pitch has given him legendary status around Stamford Bridge.

But Terry, who is currently looking to battle his way back into Antonio Conte’s watertight backline, admits Zola set the standards at the club when he was a youngster and taught him a thing or two about the art of defending.

(Photo by Ben Radford/Getty Images)

“He didn’t accept people not working hard or not trying, and obviously when you have players like Gianfranco around it naturally lifts the quality and intensity of the sessions,” Terry said.

“Even after training he’d grab a bag of balls, call you over as a young defender and run at you, twisting, turning and leaving you in tangles.

“It was all a learning curve, though, because he would step in and tell you where to position your body to make it more difficult for the striker. He was always offering advice.

“It was the same with his free-kicks. Over the years we saw so many of them go in the top corner and as a youngster watching from the stands, every time we got a free-kick on the edge of the box you fancied him to score.

“That was purely because he worked so hard and practiced them over and over. That was a massive lesson to us all back then.”