Costa has caused his fair share of controversy since arriving in English football, but Wright beleives it is all pre-planned.
Ian Wright has told The Sun that he believes the famously volatile antics of Chelsea striker Diego Costa are calculated mind games rather than an apparent inability to control his temper.
Costa has become something of a pantomime villain in English football with his combative style and aggressive nature landing him in hot water in a number of occasions, particularly when given retrospective bans for a stamp on Liverpool’s Emre Can and a scuffle with Gabriel, the Arsenal defender being sent off for his reaction and costing his side the game.
However, after a difficult second season under Jose Mourinho, the former Atletico spearhead has been praised for his focus this season, scoring 10 times in 12 Premier League games while receiving no yellow cards since September’s defeat to Arsenal.
But Wright, who admits he used to wind up opposition defenders in order to give himself a mental advantage, beleives Costa’s behaviour is a premeditated attempt to get under the skin of his opposition.
“I’ve got nothing but admiration for him,” the former Arsenal striker wrote in his column for The Sun. “Costa is a player who gets in the psyche of defenders even before they are on the pitch. Someone they’ll be thinking of days before the game.
“He is the master of all those tricks I used to try in my playing days, when you’d look for anything to give you that slight advantage.
“The point being, you’d try to annoy defenders, anything to knock them off their guard.
“Pulling them, grabbing them — nothing really nasty — just to have them looking where you are all the time. Costa is someone who does that naturally.”
Regardless of whether he is a reformed character this season or is simply moving away from the tactic, the Spanish international appears a player reborn under Antonio Conte, a similarly competitive character with an infamous volatile streak.
In particular, Costa is approaching games with that trademark high intensity once more, while honing his predatory instinct within the box after spending the latter part of Mourinho’s reign running the channels somewhat ineffectually.
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