Liverpool flop El-Hadji Diouf has claimed that Steven Gerrard was responsible for Mario Balotelli’s doomed Anfield spell.
Balotelli ended a nightmare two years with the Reds at the end of last month when he joined Nice on a free transfer.
And the Italian striker did not hold back in his assessment on his former employers, deriding the move to Merseyside as ‘the worst mistake of my life‘.
However Diouf, who endured a similarly fruitless spell at Liverpool in the mid-2000s, has made the extraordinary claim that Balotelli’s failure was aligned to former Kop captain Gerrard.
“I told him not to go to Liverpool. It wasn’t made for him, that things couldn’t go well with Gerrard, who has never had his talent and then said negative things about him,’ he told L’Equipe.
“Gerrard is a jealous man who doesn’t like men of character. Mario is a good person that you should listen to.
“He’s not a guy who’s going to cause problems in the dressing room.”