Chelsea’s Fikayo Tomori exploded on to the scene before falling off the cliff. What questions need to be asked of the player and this mystery?
Fikayo Tomori was ever present for Chelsea right up until January. After that, he became a name people only ever heard about because he certainly was not playing. It was a sharp change in fortunes for the young Englishman that has thrown his future into disarray. What questions need to be asked before the new season?
1. What happened with him?
The obvious question is how a player can go from being a locked on starter with the team to playing just three times in 2020. Because it was never made clear by the player or the club what happened and fans have only been left to speculate with very few pieces of information to go off of.
The initial excuse for him being dropped was an illness. Those are not unusual in January and from time to time, they can be quite severe. It is possible that he picked up some bug that truly did put him out of contention as deep as March. The problem is the league resumed after that and he did not play at all.
The next option brought up is Frank Lampard became aggravated at his mistakes. This is at least a theory that can have some merit. Despite Tomori being excellent, he was still a somewhat raw player and he did tend to make at least one costly mistake per game.
But did he really make any more mistakes than Andreas Christensen or Antonio Rudiger? Surely not but even still the best Tomori could do was make the bench.
That leaves the final option of some off the pitch incident or series of incidents that resulted in behind closed doors disciplinary action. There are rumors to that, but they are thin enough that they are not truly worth bringing up. If they were true, however, they would have had to be extremely egregious given the Euros were supposed to be coming up.
The truth is no one knows the answer because no one is saying. It is all speculation and that can be as dangerous as actually knowing. Fans will simply have to wait for the truth to come out.