With the World Cup under a week away from kicking off, many may have thought that teams would be taking it easy in their warm-up matches to ensure that they are peak condition for when the real business rolls into town.
Not so.
Instead, a series of brutal tackles have been witnessed in the so-called friendlies in the past few days, with the three major victims being Didier Drogba, Yasuyuki Konno & Marko Marin.