"Breaking Diego Costa's nose made me famous in school"
Fikayo Tomori, one of the sensations in Frank Lampard's Chelsea, recalled how he fractured the striker's nose while he an 18-year-old still studying in school.
So far this season, Fikayo Tomori has played five full Premier League games, both of Chelsea's Champions League games and was one of the four subs who came on in August's UEFA Super Cup final against Liverpool. Tomori is still only 21 and together with Mason Mount and Tammy Abraham he is one of the players who have helped Chelsea keep it together while they are unable to strengthen the squad because of a FIFA transfer ban. But Tomori, the young centre-back who is thrilling Stamford Bridge every weekend, already made a name for himself after breaking Diego Costa's nose in training a few years ago: "It was an accident - I was still in school and I didn’t know I had done it in training. I didn’t know I had done it until the next day when it was all over the papers. I got back to school and people were asking about it. My mates had all seen it. I was getting a lot of messages like I meant to do it, but it was alright. Diego Costa wasn't angry about it, but he didn’t kick me in training after that. I got a little bit of stick though - it was light hearted, a lot of banter about what happened".
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High ball, collision, Costa ends up with a broken nose
The two players collided while going for ball at Chelsea's Cobham training complex in 2016. It meant Costa was forced to wear a protective mask until the fractured healed: "We both went up for a header, I had to flick the ball backwards and he tried to score. He headed the back of my head and broke his nose".
Tomori has earned a call-up for Gareth Southgate's England squad for the forthcoming Euro 2020 qualifiers against the Czech Republic and Bulgaria. The defender, who could make his debut either in Prague on Friday or on Monday night in Sofia, revealed that he found out about hsi call-up from Chelsea boss Frank Lampard: "It was a weird one when I got the call-up, you don't think about how you're going to react when you get called up but when the manager told me I was like, I didn't know to react. I called my dad, he told me well done about the Lille game last night, and I just told him then that I was getting a call-up for England the next day. He was like 'No? How do you know?' I told him the manager had told me and he was screaming on the phone. Those are the kind of moments that you never forget".