OLDER PLAYERS HAVE TRIED TO KICK ME OFF THE PARK. BUT I’VE PROVED... I’M NOT WEAK
AS CAPTAIN of Vitesse Arnhem in Holland for much of the past decade, the Georgia central defender Guram Kashia saw so many Chelsea loanees pass through the club that he would not be able to remember them all.
Kashia will always recall one, though. ‘Man, this boy is brilliant,’ he said of Mason Mount. ‘I have seen some very good Chelsea talents over the years but Mason is the best’.
Mount was 18 when he followed the path trodden by so many Chelsea boys and joined Vitesse on a season’s loan in the summer of 2017. He remembers his early moments vividly and he also knows now what was running through the mind of the one team-mate above all whom he had to impress.
‘I walked into the dressing-room and there were a lot of big characters who had done a lot in the game,’ Mount tells Sportsmail. ‘I am a kid. It’s a test. So I am going round and shaking everybody’s hand and he [Kashia] told me at the end of the season what he was actually thinking.
‘He said to me later, “I couldn’t believe they had signed this tiny little kid. You looked lost and I couldn’t believe we had signed you”.
‘I probably looked scared and nervous and young and small. Which I was. But by the end of the season I had been voted player of the year by the fans and had scored 14 goals.
‘I had grown so much and learned so much. For him [Kashia] to later say that he was wrong and that I had proved my worth meant a lot. It meant I had won that particular battle. I had met that challenge’.
Mount, 21 now, has been meeting challenges and stepping over hurdles for as long as he can remember. Having joined Chelsea at six, he has always had talent but that’s not always enough.
Chelsea’s record of bringing young players through their academy into the first team was modest enough even for Mount’s father Tony to once suggest a move to another club would be wise.
Yet here he is, farther down the track in 2020. Mount is a Chelsea regular under Frank Lampard and is destined to be part of Gareth Southgate’s squad at this summer’s European Championship. Sometimes, he says, he and his team-mate Tammy Abraham have to ‘pinch ourselves’ to believe their progress is real.
But to take that at face value would be to believe that Mount thinks he has got lucky.
He doesn’t. He knows why he is here. A combination of hard work, ability and selfbelief has brought Mount into Lampard’s team via his season at Vitesse and last year’s loan at Derby County in the Championship.
Down in the second tier, they tried to intimidate Mount. They kicked him, too. He is slight and boyish, just waiting to be pushed around, right? Wrong.
‘There was this one time,’ laughs Mount, ‘I was up against this experienced player and he obviously saw me as young and a first- time player in the Championship. He tried to get one over on me and show he was the bigger man. It was maybe like a test to see what I was like as a player and where I was at as a person.
‘Is he weak? Can he take tough tackles or little things off the ball that don’t get seen or spoken about? But it never fazed me at all. We carried on playing. I kept my head and knew what he was trying to do. And then I scored and that kind of finished it... I had a word with him as I ran back.
‘I can’t tell you what I said to him but it was explicit! He didn’t say anything back. If it was a test then I came out on top. He knew by the end of that game that I wasn’t weak-minded.’
The only thing that story lacks is a name but Mount isn’t for telling. Even at his age he is too cute for that.
On the field his advance feels rapid but it’s not the way he sees it. He has started all but two of Chelsea’s 22 Premier League games in this his debut season but in his mind has been preparing for this season for years.
‘When I hear you talk about it then, yeah, I realise it’s happened so quickly,’ he nods. ‘But it was different in my head. I never saw myself as a prospect, it was always about playing as much football as I can.
‘The two years out on loan were about trying to get experience and work as hard as I could to make sure when I came back I could give myself the best chance to get back to Chelsea and get in the team. That was my goal. The mentality side of football is massive.
‘Coming through the academy and seeing so many brilliant footballers that I have played with since I was six being moved on
and released and having to do something else with their lives was telling. They were technically unbelievable but just didn’t have that mentality side. When you are close or good friends, it’s tough. But my dad always said, “That’s football and these things happen. You just have to make sure it’s not you.” ‘And he was right. You don’t want to be the boy leaving Chelsea, you want to train like every session is your last session because you know you always have to prove something to people. ‘My dad drilled that in to me at a young age that you don’t want to get released. You can’t let your foot off the pedal because if you do boys are coming in from overseas that are very talented and they will want to take your place.’ Mount Snr was a football manager at non-league Havant Town. His son’s early years were spent on team buses and in cold, rudimentary dressing rooms. ‘I grew up around that kind of environment,’ he recalls. ‘Rough football, players getting sent off and kicking off all the time. I was very young. It was fun.’ It was at a meeting at the family home in Waterlooville six years ago that Tony Mount advised his son to reject a contract at Chelsea and listen to one of the many offers from elsewhere.
‘I told Mason I thought he needed to move on to get the best opportunity,’ Mount Snr told The Sun recently. ‘I said: “No one at Chelsea’s academy has got into the first-team since John Terry — what chance have you got?”
‘But Mason shot back, “I will be the next one. I am not leaving Chelsea”.’
Chelsea’s belief in their young playmaker was such that Mount was offered a four-year contract when his contemporaries were offered two years, if anything at all.
Now he is ready to face another challenge. Chelsea are free from the transfer embargo that restricted Lampard’s ability to buy players and if new signings do not arrive this month they surely will next summer.
‘For me, it’s about having that same attitude I have had since I was six and making sure I never lose it,’ he smiles. ‘You just have to fight. You know Chelsea can always buy £60million or £70m or £80m players that are world class. They want to come here and take my place.
‘Just because I am an academy boy and young, that doesn’t mean anything. But the mentality I have means I won’t be pushed over easily. I will fight for my position and keep working hard. At a club as big as Chelsea you have to have that mentality. It always stuck with me. It’s why I am here in the first place.’
Mount is an intelligent footballer, one Southgate earmarked for England recognition long before he pulled on a senior shirt. So far he has six appearances and his first goal. Sitting at Chelsea’s training ground, there is a simple and open brightness about him. They say the Premier League academies create capable people and not just capable footballers and maybe they are right.
Recently, Chelsea’s league form — so impressive at the start of the season — has dipped a little. At Stamford Bridge, for example, they have lost to Southampton, Bournemouth and West Ham and it’s indicative of Mount’s standing in Lampard’s team that he feels he has to take a share of the blame.
‘It’s natural that young players will be up and down and it’s probably the best thing that can happen,’ he says. ‘It makes you ask yourself why you played well one week and then dropped your levels the next.
‘If I am not good enough in a game — if I am losing the ball and stuff — then I see those as key experiences and I won’t hide from that. You are playing against world-class players and they will take advantage of days when you