Adrien Rabiot and Jonathan Rowe left Marseille in disgrace after ugly fight but are set to meet for new clubs in Serie A
P
hysical fights between teammates are nothing new in football. Newcastle’s Lee Bowyer and Kieron Dyer were famously sent off for trading blows on the pitch in 2005, before issuing grovelling apologies after the game. John Hartson kicked his West Ham teammate Eyal Berkovic in the face during a training-ground bust-up in 1998, with the midfielder claiming: “If my head had been a ball, it would have been in the top corner of the net.” Robinho once took a pop at Thomas Gravesen during a Real Madrid training session in 2006. The Dane responded, and was sold that summer to Celtic.
But few altercations can match the ferocity of the fight between Adrien Rabiot and the England Under-21 winger Jonathan Rowe in the Marseille dressing room last month, after a 1-0 defeat by a 10-man Rennes side. The brawl was so “incredibly violent” that a junior member of the Marseille squad, Darryl Bakola, fainted as he watched.
Roberto De Zerbi, the Marseille manager, said: “I’ve never seen a fight like that before. We have two employees fighting like in an English pub, with a teammate on the ground because he had lost consciousness. What should the employer do in France? There are two solutions, either suspension or dismissal.” Marseille chose the latter, with Rabiot and Rowe both sold at the end of the transfer window, to Milan and Bologna respectively.
