Ruben still has lofty ambitions
HE IS the finely chiselled, 6ft 4in exception that proves Jose Mourinho has broken his vow to England.
Ruben Loftus-Cheek just scraped it on to the plane for Russia but his presence highlights the fact that, in his own words, the Special One is to blame for the poor delivery of talent to the senior team.
Four summers ago, at the club’s pre-season retreat in Austria, Mourinho was at his imperious best.
“We are ready to be champions,” he said grandly, and 10 months later Chelsea were crowned as such.
But he also made a very specific proclamation about this World Cup now.
“In two or three years, Chelsea will have a strong team with seven or eight English guys from the academy,” he added. “I could mention to you Lewis Baker, Izzy Brown, Dominic Solanke: I think if in a few years they are not national team players, I should blame myself.”
Baker had played in the FA Cup at as an 18-year-old that season but is now 23 and still on Chelsea’s books without a single Premier League appearance to his name.
Brown, 21, has made a series of top-flight outings this term, mainly from the bench on loan at Brighton, before an anterior cruciate ligament injury ended his season in January.
Solanke moved to Liverpool last summer to breathe fresh life into his career and did make his England bow with a cameo substitute appearance as part of an experimental side against Brazil in November coming ahead of his first Premier League start. The unnamed Tammy Abraham played in two of those autumn friendlies but neither has been mentioned since even as outsiders. Nathaniel Chalobah, on loan at Watford, had earlier been called up for qualifiers against Malta and Slovakia but still remains without a cap.
Patrick Bamford, the forerunner of all those Chelsea starlets back in 2014, will turn 25 in September without so much as a sniff of senior international honours.
Which leaves Loftus-Cheek as the last of Mourinho’s seven or eight.” He is the only one to have made it to the top and, on balance, feels that has been despite his Chelsea academy upbringing as much as because of it.
“At 17, I don’t think it’s good for them to go somewhere else to play,” said Mourinho in 2014.
“At 17 they have to train with us and have to learn with us.”
Loftus-Cheek, whose season on loan at Crystal Palace this year has been his making, disagrees.
“At Chelsea, I progressed quite quickly until I got to the first team and then it was different,” he said.
“I improved a lot with the training, because I think the coaches are the best and the facilities are the best.
“But when you get to the first team the step up is massive. There are world-class players in front of you and that is difficult at a big club like Chelsea, no matter how talented you are. I was in awe. I remember Didier Drogba being there for my first session. It was a surreal feeling having watched somebody on TV score so many goals and there I was, still so young, getting that nervous feeling.
“It is difficult when you are not playing to still train your best, still eat right and do all the right things because there is no reward at the end of the week. That is the toughest thing mentally.
“But looking back now, I do realise the benefits of playing game after game, so in that sense I wish I’d played more.”
Loftus-Cheek remains under contract until 2021. Pointedly, perhaps, he does not want to think about his future beyond next month’s tournament.
“I have to go back to Chelsea for pre-season anyway, that is where I will be after the World Cup,” he said. “So I will decide what happens then.”
I was in awe training with Drogba