Black Stars defender, Abdul Baba Rahman has revealed that Nigeria’s John Mikel Obi tried to convince him to stay at Chelsea following the arrival of Antonio Conte at the club.
Baba Rahman, formerly of Asante Kotoko and Dreams FC was signed during Jose Mourinho’s last season at Chelsea but struggled to break into the starting lineup.
The arrival of Conte at the club got the situation worse which forced the defender to join Bundesliga side Schalke 04 on loan.
According to him, Mikel Obi tried to convince him to stay at the club despite all his troubles with the Italian manager.
He revealed that the Nigerian midfielder actually advised him to ignore Conte’s antics but things only got worse, so he had to leave.
“I don’t know maybe my name was easy on his tongue, like every small thing was like ‘Baba’ ‘Baba’ and most of the players came to ask me what’s going on and I said I don’t know,” he told Joy Sports.
“The first meeting, he told me to just keep calm and keep working hard so I said that’s fine. This was in London and then we went to Austria and it started getting worse and that’s when I said no, I can’t take it anymore.”
Rahman added: “Mikel Obi told me to just stay and shouldn’t bother what [Conte] is doing, but as young as I was, I was not taking it lightly so when we went to Austria I spoke to the Sporting Director and told him [that] it is going overboard and I can’t take it.
“So they told me okay, so what do you want to do? I told them I would prefer to leave and they said no the club doesn’t want to sell me. So I said okay if that’s so then I would prefer to go on loan from here.”
Rahman has returned to Chelsea for pre-season ahead of next season, having ended his six-month loan spell at Greek side PAOK.
Also, watch this week’s episode of the Friday debate on GhanaWeb TV with Joel Eshun in the post below: