Chelsea captain Gary Cahill has broken
ranks and criticised the club for their lack
of activity in the transfer market this summer.
Antonio Conte has invested well over
£100million on Alvaro Morata, Tiemoue
Bakayoko and Antonio Rudiger, but those
arrivals have been largely offset by the
departure of Nemanja Matic to Manchester
United and Diego Costa’s exile.
A host of the club’s academy graduates
have left on permanent deals and season-long
loans, leaving Conte, who has been thwarted
in his attempts to sign the likes of Dani Alves,
Alex Sandro and Danilo, short of options
ahead of his side’s Premier League opener
against Burnley on Saturday.
‘In terms of quality, we certainly have the quality,
you saw that last season, but again there’s
no way of getting around it that we have to
keep players fit because at the minute the
squad is not as big as other squads.‘Maybe
I’m talking out of turn, I would have thought
so but there is no getting away from the fact
that if you look at the back of the programme
from the weekend (the squad is small),’
Cahill told talkSPORT.
TRANSFERS IN
Willy Caballero (free, from Manchester City),
Antonio Rudiger (£34m, from Roma),
Tiemoue Bakayoko (£40m, from Monaco),
Alvaro Morata (£60m, from Real Madrid)
TRANSFERS OUT
Juan Cuadrado (£17m, to Juventus),
Christian Atsu (£6.2m, to Newcastle),
Dominic Solanke (Compensation,
to Liverpool), Asmir Begovic (£10m,
to Bournemouth), Alex Kiwomya (free,
to Doncaster), Bertrand Traore (£8.8m,
to Lyon), Nathan Ake (£20m,
to Bournemouth), John Terry (free,
to Aston Villa), Tammy Abraham (loan,
to Swansea), Alex Davey (released),
Ruben Loftus-Cheek (loan,
to Crystal Palace), Nathaniel Chalobah
(£5m, to Watford)
‘That’s vitally important for us and we will
have to see how that plays out.’
Cahill’s comments echo the sentiments of
club legend Frank Lampard who used Sunday’s match day programme to emphasise Chelsea’s lack of squad depth ahead of the penalty shootout defeat to Arsenal.
‘I was looking at the programme here earlier and you look at the two teams there, the squads, Chelsea are almost half of what the Arsenal squad is,’ he said on BT Sport.
‘If we’re talking about quality, I still think Chelsea have that quality.
‘But you can see at Juventus I think he used to do the same thing, in the summer he’d push the club to buy more players to move forward. And I think he’s concerned – they’re going to lose Costa, they’ve lost Matic. They’ve brought players in but I think he wants more because now they’re going to be competing in the Champions League as well.’
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