Jamal Blackman joins, Isaiah Brown returns to Chelsea loan army
By George Perry
Jamal Blackman and Isaiah Brown slipped quietly off on loan spells yesterday, while Chelsea’s impending season-opener with West Ham United monopolized everyone’s attention.
Lost in the shuffle and noise, Chelsea announced that forward Isaiah Brown will spend the 2016/17 season on loan to Rotherham United in the Championship. At about the same time, Wycombe Wanderers revealed that goalkeeper Jamal Blackman will spend the first half of the season with the League Two side.
Blackman and Brown were both members of the 2013/14 Under-21 Premier League winning side at Chelsea’s Academy. They each have UEFA Youth Leagues and FA Youth Cups to their names.
Blackman has been Chelsea’s third-choice keeper since 2013, a role that has resulted in zero first team appearances for the Blues. He is going to Wycombe to – you guessed it – “benefit from regular first-team football.” With Wycombe in League Two, Blackman will face fellow Blue-in-name-only Mitchell Beeney, currently on loan assignment to Crawley Town FC.
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Michael Emenalo and his team of advisers apparently think that the lowest team not to be relegated from last year’s Championship is a better development destination for Isaiah Brown than his previous foster club, Vitesse Arnhem. Either that, or Emenalo & Co. think that Brown’s skills are less marketable and need remedial work before bringing him back to Stamford Bridge.
Brown made 24 appearances and scored one goal for Vitesse Arnhem last year. Injuries disrupted his season, but he was at least exposed to top-tier football in the Eredivisie.
The Brown and Blackman loans are completely consistent with Chelsea’s nakedly sterile loan policy. Blackman, like Michael Hector and Mohamed Salah, is at an age where he needs stability and long-term continuity, not another loan period. Brown, like Tammy Abraham, needs top-tier football, not a bottom of the table second-tier team.
Throughout the off-season rumours abounded about Chelsea bringing in another keeper to replace either Thibaut Courtois or Asmir Begovic. Jamal Blackman’s name never came up. If the club was serious about Blackman ascending to the first team, we would have heard it then. Clearly, Chelsea’s front office barely sees him as a long-term third-string option, let alone a Premier League substitute.
Isaiah Brown has long been touted as one of Chelsea academy’s young guns, a prospective youth-to-first-team star. He completed his requisite loan spell at “Chelsea B,” after which time one would expect him to either move up or transfer out. Instead, Chelsea delivered him to Door #3: Blue purgatory down one level in England.
If you’re a regular Pride of London reader (well, first, thank you!), you’re probably as tired of reading these posts as we are to write them. Just think about how much worse it must be for the Charlie Colkett’s and Jay DaSilva’s of the world. They watch their peers go off on mismatched loans spells one by one. The lesson they learn is that they rate so lowly to their own club that will likely spend more time in League Two venues than they ever will in Stamford Bridge.