Chelsea academy graduate Ruben Loftus-Cheek ruptured his Achilles during a friendly with New England Revolution and he has been on the sidelines ever since.
Due to the injury, the player missed the Europa League final and also the whole pre-season for the Blues but Frank Lampard has revealed that Ruben Loftus-Cheek is getting closer to full fitness.
“He is getting closer, he has trained over the last week or two with the Under-23s, there is going to be a period of conditioning work for him,” Lampard said last week.
“The injury looks good which is great news.
“Then he is going to have to be fitter than he has ever been because I want him to run.”
While the return of the midfielder will certainly be good news for the fans but right now the team is really struggling to score goals with both Tammy Abraham and Olivier Giroud failing to get their act going during the first three games of the season.
And speaking after the draw vs Leicester City, Paul Merson had claimed that the goal drought is something that the manager will have to deal with throughout the whole season.
“At the moment, firepower wise, I just do not think they have a cutting edge. A team who dominated those games against Man Utd and Leicester would have won them quite comfortably,” Merson had said.
“But they just have to live with the fact they will not blow teams away as they do not have that prolific goal scorer.
“Put it this way: if Alexandre Lacazette and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang had been playing up front for Chelsea, they would have had six points.”
But now it looks like Frank Lampard has found a solution to this problem and as per reports, the manager intends to use Ruben Loftus-Cheek as a centre-forward when he returns back from injury.
While the 23-year-old has never played in that role for the senior side but surely Lampard feels the academy graduate can adapt to the duties pretty well.
We are still unsure if this plan will work positively or not but one thing is for certain, three strikers is any day a better deal than two of them.
