Chelsea are still waiting for an academy graduate to follow in John Terry’s footsteps and cement a regular starting place in the side, for all that Loftus-Cheek is highly regarded, has been training with the senior players since January and is a regular in their match-day squads. The midfielder has travelled to Israel, where a victory could secure passage into the knockout phase, with Kurt Zouma, Kenedy, Baba Rahman, Bertrand Traoré, the goalkeeper Jamal Blackman and the teenage right-back Ola Aina also in the squad.
Chelsea are still waiting for an academy graduate to follow in John Terry’s footsteps and cement a regular starting place in the side, for all that Loftus-Cheek is highly regarded, has been training with the senior players since January and is a regular in their match-day squads. The midfielder has travelled to Israel, where a victory could secure passage into the knockout phase, with Kurt Zouma, Kenedy, Baba Rahman, Bertrand Traoré, the goalkeeper Jamal Blackman and the teenage right-back Ola Aina also in the squad.
Loftus-Cheek started against Maccabi in September, impressing in a 4-0 win which Chelsea will hope to replicate at the Sammy Ofer stadium in Haifa. Yet the criticism regularly levelled at Mourinho and Chelsea, who have more than 30 players out on loan, is that younger players are not offered a route into the first team. “But I can give you figures [that disprove that],” the manager said. “In the first-team squad we have seven under-21 players who have 26 starts and 12 substitute appearances this season, and 43 appearances on the bench [when they were] not used.
“OK, Zouma is in his second season at this level and is unleashing himself as a top player, and people forget that he’s 20. We are very happy with him and, to be fair, I’m happy with myself too because, when he came here, he was not the player he is now. I remember the first two matches he played for us in pre-season in 2014 and he was not good. He was very bad. But now he’s a player, fighting with Terry and Cahill hand to hand. But we have 26 starts. It’s a lot in a club like Chelsea when you have a lot of top players.”
There have been suggestions some of the youngsters struggling to gain first-team involvement at their loan clubs – Izzy Brown and Nathan at Vitesse Arnhem, together with Patrick Bamford at Crystal Palace, are cited as examples – may return to Chelsea in January. “But the ones who are not playing at Vitesse, we cannot expect them to play here,” Mourinho said. “They have to fight to play. If they want to play with men and against men, at the top level, they cannot be protected forever. Sometimes ‘evolution’ is not about playing but feeling that it is difficult to play, and feeling the direction they have to go in if they want to be top players in top clubs.”
Zouma is expected to start here, where a win would secure progress if Dynamo Kyiv fail to beat Porto in Portugal, with Eden Hazard most likely to revert to a position on the left having played as a central playmaker in recent games. Although Hazard favours the No10 role, Mourinho used him there primarily “to help him recover his confidence” and considers him best operating from the flank.
“He can attack defenders more in an individual way,” he said of using the Belgian on the left. “When he gets the ball it’s more about him attacking the right-back and the right-back is always in trouble against a player who has his best quality in a one-against-one. When he plays at No10 he gets into areas where sometimes he is surrounded by teams who play zonal with two or three players in the same zone. Many times he receives the ball with his back to the opponents and players can be very aggressive, pressing him from behind. But he can do both.”
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