Chelsea: Goalscorers abound in loan army, with Mason Mount leading the day

Mason Mount scored a hat trick and Tammy Abraham scored his 24th league goal of the season, pushing the Championship promotion playoffs closer to being a very Chelsea affair.

Saturday was another banner day for players on the fringe of Chelsea FC. In the Championship, Aston Villa extended their win streak to eight games. Tammy Abraham opened the scoring from the spot, his fourth goal in that eight game run.

A few spots below Villa in the table, Mason Mount showed just how much he is Frank Lampard’s heir as well as protege. Mount scored three goals against the troubled-in-all-ways Bolton Wanderers, bringing his recent tally up to four goals in the four games since he returned from injury.

The loanees’ production on Saturday – and, of course, the leadership of Frank Lampard and John Terry at their respective clubs – tightened the race for the Championship playoff spaces. Fifth-place Aston Villa defeated sixth-place Bristol City. That allowed Derby County, in eighth place, to close within two points of Bristol City for the final playoff berth. Derby County and Bristol City square off in two weeks, in what could be the “sixth-place championship” for the Championship.

"Mason missed two months of the season and that shows he’s a boy that’s going to score goals and that’s important for us. We haven’t got the centre-forward that’s scoring 25 goals, so we have to contribute from other areas… The next two games are huge for us. – Frank Lampard, BT Sport"

Chelsea’s other academy graduate now on loan at Derby County, Fikayo Tomori, picked up the supporters’ club Player of the Season award. Tomori has the second-most minutes for Derby this season, behind his centreback partner Richard Keogh, who is 11 years his senior.

More so than being a loanee – Chelsea’s loan army regularly rack up club awards at their foster clubs – the remarkable aspect of Tomori’s award is his being a defender.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Alvaro Morata came on as a second-half substitute and scored his fifth goal for Atletico Madrid 12 minutes later. Morata now has as many league goals for Atletico as he did for Chelsea in the first half of the season, and needed about two-thirds as many minutes to reach that mark in La Liga.

Unfortunately, neither Morata nor any of his teammates could found a way to score last weekend against Barcelona, in large part because of Diego Costa’s red card in the first half. As a result, the combination of Atletico’s win with a draw by an unrecognizable Barcelona side means next to nothing in the big picture. Barcelona are solely focused on putting away Manchester United in the Champions League, while Atletico are aiming to simply lock down a no-more-distant-than-necessary second-place finish.

Should Chelsea need any goalscorers next season, the loan army certainly has its share. Of course, that all depends on the transfer ban and whether anyone in the loan army will understand Maurizio Sarri’s system as thoroughly as Gonzalo Higuain does.