Chelsea Squad Prepares for Mauricio Pochettino's Innovative 'Gacon Test'

Mauricio Pochettino's expected arrival at Chelsea may be very popular with fans but some players won't be as pleased to be doing the training.

Tottenham Hotspur are pretty desperate for a new manager, after their whole season went so wrong that even their interim manager was sacked.

Pochettino has been linked with a return to the club ever since he left them in November 2019, once was sacked just five months after reaching the Champions League final.

However it's not Spurs fans who will be seeing the Argentinian manager arrive this summer as instead he looks set to turn up in west London for Chelsea, with even Domino's mocking the side from north London.

The Blues have been in even more disaray than their London rivals this season, although they haven't actually sacked interim manager Frank Lampard just yet.

Their draw with Nottingham Forest at the weekend means Lampard has just one win in his eight games since returning to Stamford Bridge.

Fortunately for them it'll be Pochettino in charge at Stamford Bridge for the next campaign rather than the club's all time top goalscorer, although it's not been confirmed yet.

That change will likely be an excellent one but it means that players will have to go through the Gacon test that Poch likes to put his players through.

The test, which Poch runs every week after a game, sees players given 45 seconds to cover 150 metres with 15 seconds to rest and each subsequent 45 seconds sees players run an extra 6.25 meters, as he explained in his book.

It has not gone down too well with players in the past, with former Southampton striker Rickie Lambert revealing he approached the manager about relaxing the intensity, after struggling with the test on the Monday after games.

"I went out [of the office] and went back to the lads made up, thinking, ‘yep, just done it for you boys, next Monday gonna be sorted’," the former England international explained to the Telegraph about his chat with the boss going well.

"So, I played the game [the next weekend], 90 minutes again, come in Monday, not only did we do 12, we did 24 runs – 24 runs and I just knew, I was running around laughing and almost crying and I knew what he was doing, he was breaking me and he did, he broke me."

Lambert isn't the only one to have complained about it, with Harry Winks also revealing his dislike of the test in 2017, "It’s a killer," the midfielder said, “An absolute killer. You can imagine, after 13 or so runs, you get knackered.

"You get two warnings, if you miss the time, then you’re out. But I did really well, I was one of the last to finish. I think I got to level 20. I really pushed myself to the limit and luckily enough I did well.”

The test gets its name from Georges Gacon who devised it whilst he was the French National Team Manager of middle-distance race runners.