West Ham star Jarrod Bowen had a chip on his shoulder about his pace – so he headed to a potato field to work on it.
The Hammers frontman, tipped to make England's 2022 World Cup squad, rocked up at his uncle's farm last summer in a bid to boost his fitness.
He revealed: "One of his potato fields is pretty uneven. My old man said that running on a difficult surface would strengthen my ankles and I'd feel a lot quicker when I went back to running on grass.
"So, I practised for a onekilometre time trial that we had coming up in preseason on the potato field and then thought, 'Oh God, this is awful.'
"But back at West Ham a week later, I breezed it. So it worked."
Bowen, 25, has been such a sensation for the Irons this season he was picked in almost a third of nine million teams in the Premier League's fantasy football.
