Chelsea: Tammy Abraham needed more than winter break, and he won’t get it

Frank Lampard said he had to pull Tammy Abraham out of training several times this week. This means Chelsea know how to play with their Plan B for striker, and they will likely need it against Manchester United.

Everyone asked if Frank Lampard had a Plan B during the first few months of the season when Chelsea were struggling to get results from a rather static game plan. No one ever asked the follow-up question: If he has a Plan B, has he trained the team to some basic level of facility in it? Maybe that was the hang up – not that he didn’t have a Plan B, but the team wasn’t competent in it. Distinction without a difference, I suppose.

Now we can rest easy, somewhat. Tammy Abraham left some training sessions early this week due to his lingering injury and fatigue issues: “[He] is still feeling the effects,” Lampard said. Since training continued in his absence, the Blues logged some time learning how to play with some other striker, or possibly a false-nine.

Abraham will be assessed over the weekend and Lampard is hopeful will start, but if Abraham cannot get through a training session he will likely not be able to get through a complete game.

Depending on his fitness levels and how intense Monday’s game is, he may not even make it through a normal 70+ minute shift. In the games where he has started, Abraham has only been subbed off before the 70′ once: the Premier League season-opener.

Lampard’s decision to start Abraham and play him for 83 minutes in the last game before the break hang over the current uncertainty. When Lampard says Abraham is “still feeling the effects,” some of what he is feeling is that most recent performance. Abraham was uncertain going into that game, he looked fatigued and shaky not long after the hour mark, and here he is two full weeks later every bit as uncertain as he was then.

If two weeks off were not enough to get him fully fit, or at least certain to start, what does Frank Lampard think will happen in the four days between facing Manchester United and Tottenham? Or in the two days between Tottenham and Bayern Munich? At that point will it matter if he rests against Bournemouth, or is Bournemouth too stiff a defensive team not to start your number one striker? The Cherries did defeat Chelsea 1-0 earlier this season. Then what? Liverpool in the FA Cup and the resurgent Everton a few days later.

Those six games get us all the way to March 8. We could just talk our way through the rest of the season, but you get the point. Unless Chelsea bow out of the Champions League on March 18, the schedule never gets easier. And even if it does, the end of March is an international break where Abraham – as long as he is mildly fit – will be expected to play.

Rotation has a way of forcing itself on a manager. If he doesn’t do it by choice he ends up doing by necessity. Frank Lampard didn’t rotate Abraham when he had the chance, and now every game comes with acute uncertainty that will end with either another bout of acute uncertainty or a period of chronic certainty when the player suffers a long-term injury.

Chelsea spent some time this week with either Michy Batshuayi, Olivier Giroud, Ross Barkley, Willian or some other message-sending false-nine atop their offensive line in training.

The Blues have two strikers, including one for whom Lampard prohibited a transfer. Whatever message Lampard wanted to send with his Barkley-for-Abraham substitution against Leicester has been sent, received and hopefully replied to. Maybe the Hakim Ziyech deal is part of the reconciliation process. Regardless, Chelsea are going to need someone other than Tammy Abraham on Monday: maybe at the start, maybe at the hour. And they will need someone other than Tammy Abraham on the following Saturday, Tuesday, Saturday and Tuesday.

The question is whether Frank Lampard will take control of the situation or whether the situation will ultimately control him. He put himself in a position where he may have a lot of explaining to do if Chelsea fall short of their season’s goals because of what he did or didn’t do with those players most responsible for scoring goals.

Let’s hope those are the only outcomes he has to account for, and not anything that will impact Tammy Abraham’s ambitions for Euro 2020 and the seasons beyond.