Blues face anxious wait on Abraham

PREMIER LEAGUE: Chelsea are still unsure how long England striker Tammy Abraham will be sidelined with hip trouble.

Abraham sat out training at Chelsea’s Cobham base yesterday and will miss today’s Premier League clash with West Ham at Stamford Bridge.

Lampard expects Chelsea to know by Monday the extent of Abraham’s hip issue, that he suffered in the Blues’ 2-2 Champions League draw at Valencia on Wednesday.

“He’s got some pain,” said Lampard, of his young striker who has fired 10 goals and two assists in a blistering Premier League start this term.

Michy Batshuayi replaced Abraham off the bench in Valencia and will battle it out with Olivier Giroud to lead the line this afternoon.

IN the end, there were genuinely too many moments where the Arsenal players couldn’t really understand what Unai Emery was saying to them, but there was one early on when they couldn’t believe what they were seeing or doing.

It was in the dressing room before a match, when the Basque manager got them into a huddle and told them to put their hands into the centre, before chanting “Arsenal! Arsenal! Arsenal!”

Needless to say, it didn’t really wash with some of the senior players.

Emery, as in so many previous jobs, struggled to convince them and Freddie Ljungberg is now interim coach. That problem was summed up by the fiasco with Granit Xhaka, which was really the beginning of the end for his tenure, and then the decision on his replacement as captain. Many in the game were amazed it was Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, a player who fell asleep several times in video sessions with Borussia Dortmund.

Many more wondered how it got to this. The story of what went wrong with Emery — confused tactics and a lack of connection with the players — has by now been well told. His sacking became a matter of time.

What has not been as well told was how he even ended up with the job, and that does not just relate to the questions that mounted with the bad results in the last few months. It relates to the day he actually got the job, back on Wednesday, May 23, 2018.

What actually happened that last weekend remains a puzzle, and is hugely relevant to what happens next, and the very future of the club.

Arsenal described Emery as a “unanimous choice”, but several sources maintain that he was not on their initial shortlist when Arsene Wenger left. That shortlist included many of the names you’re hearing now: Patrick Vieira, Brendan Rodgers, Carlo Ancelotti, Max Allegri, Julian Nagelsmann… and Mikel Arteta. Emery’s name was not on it.

Their pursuit eventually came down to Arteta, who sold a hugely exciting vision, with negotiations going very far. So far, in fact, that the feeling among the former midfielder and his planned Arsenal staff was that they had the job.

It was on the Monday, however, that things went quiet.

Some of the Arsenal hierarchy began to think that, as with Nagelsmann, it was just too much of a gamble.

That, however, was an absolutely key point that is all the more important now.

Certain figures at Arsenal had made a lot of how they appointed Wenger, and how it represented the kind of successful leftfield thinking that had initially seen the club forge ahead in the modern era.

The reality was that the French great’s shadow was so vast that they actually required something like that in May 2018 just to change the thinking around the club, or on the other hand a big name who had a sufficiently big personality to carry that weight. Both would have represented an electrical charge.

In the end, they went with neither. They went in between, in every sense — to a relatively replaceable technocrat manager, who excited few. Emery was by no means a rookie or an unsuccessful manager, but he wasn’t elite either.

He was seen as a “safe pair of hands” when his name was finally put forward by trusted advisors “out of nowhere, late in the process”, and the Arsenal hierarchy went with that. They showed the opposite of that leftfield thinking.

It was too safe, too dull, and predictably underwhelmed.

But the wonder is now also about the effect of Emery’s appointment, and that doesn’t just relate to the fact Arsenal now need that electrical charge more than ever, either.

There’s also the effect on one of the main candidates. Many are intrigued by what Arteta will tell them. Sources close to the process say he felt badly burned by how it worked out last time.

For his part, the Manchester City assistant is said to be intrigued again now. He wants to get into management that badly, and he loves Arsenal that much. But then there’s also the allure of the City job. Some who know him wonder whether he should just work Arsenal to get the best possible offer, then take it to City to get guarantees over