Chelsea players will feel let down by Diego Costa - but there's an obvious replacement

After the nonsense of last week, there are suggestions that Antonio Conte has said Diego Costa won’t get back into the Chelsea squad until his attitude improves, and I think that is the right way to play it. What is the alternative? A manager getting on his hands and knees and grovelling, asking Costa to come back?

Costa will have bridges to rebuild if he does return to favour. When I was playing for Manchester United, if Eric Cantona had turned around half way through a title challenge and started talking about a move to China, and wasn’t playing any games any more, we’d have felt cheated.

We’d have felt betrayed by a team-mate and we wouldn’t be able to trust him anymore. You wouldn’t believe that a team-mate would do something so potentially damaging to the club’s ambitions. We’ve seen how the West Ham players feel about Dimitri Payet, after all. They won’t be bold enough to say anything, but Chelsea’s players must be very disappointed too.

You want players who will put the team first, not themselves. Football is not an individual sport. I think the message Conte is trying to impart is that Costa has to be respectful of his team-mates and the club. You can’t allow special cases, and it’s a team which wins you the title, not a single player on their own.

There was a good illustration of that at the weekend. Costa missed the Leicester match after his row with Conte and Eden Hazard played up front, supported by Pedro and Willian; it was one of Chelsea’s best attacking performances of the whole season.

You always need alternatives, even to a striker as decisive as Costa, and Chelsea showed that they are far from helpless without him. Having said that, there is no question that the club and the players will want Costa to reconcile quickly and be available again. He runs into brick walls and makes things happen, and that makes him very useful to have around the place.

The problem with the January window is that if gives players an opportunity to put their clubs under pressure by throwing a strop. They are such important assets that it can cause chaos, and they can hold their teams to ransom.

Players get their heads turned all the time. The big difference here is that Costa is in contention to win the Golden Boot and be named the Player of the Year for a club which is odds-on favourite to win the league title. I can’t ever remember a player like that agitating for a move halfway through the season.

If it’s for the money and that is his driving force, then okay. It is ultimately a job. But for most players it’s about more than that. It’s about the glory, you want to play for the best teams in the best leagues and win the best competitions. It’s about representing your national team.

Moving to China puts all that at risk, unless his ego is telling him he’s big enough to be an exception. But I don’t think he will. He could make all the money in the world but where is the glory in winning a Chinese league title? He could be forgotten in a year or two.

Even if Costa does stay beyond the end of the month, Conte must be tempted to cut him loose at the end of the season given what has transpired this week. But then again, you can’t rule out anything in football. If Costa says he is willing to sign a new contract then Chelsea might want to protect their investment.

Either way, though, they have to have a contingency plan in place, and if Chelsea want a ready-made replacement, I believe there is one. He doesn’t have the same physical stature but Alvaro Morata, at Real Madrid, does have the same work-rate.

He is the one who will run in behind and do all the ugly work while still scoring goals. He is the perfect player to replace Costa, and in fact his football brain is actually more impressive than his international colleague’s. He will score better technical goals and is the superior all-round player.

So Costa isn't the be-all and end-all for Chelsea - and he should remember that.