Owen Hargreaves can’t believe that Frank Lampard is not selecting Chelsea defender Benoit Badiashile to play games.
Benoit Badiashile, who’s just 22, looks like one of the few positive signings made by the Blues in the past couple of transfer windows.
Chelsea signed the French defender in a £35million (BBC) deal from Monaco in January, which could be a really shrewd investment for the young talent.
He’s looked calm and composed in his nine appearances for the club so far. However, he’s played just one of the five matches since Frank Lampard took charge as caretaker manager, albeit he was unavailable in the two Champions League ties against Real Madrid.
Badiashile did find himself on the bench last night and was an unused substitute in the 2-0 Premier League defeat against Brentford.
Speaking after Chelsea’s fifth straight defeat, BT Sport pundit Hargreaves mentioned the 22-year-old absence from the XI.
“Badiashile, I don’t know why he didn’t play. He’s fantastic,” Hargreaves told BT Sport 3 (9:55pm, 26 April).
We’ve got to agree with Hargreaves on this!
The left-footed centre-half has settled very quickly into a new league and country, so for Lampard to overlook him right now does seem an odd decision.
Of course, we don’t get to see what happens behind closed doors on the training pitch. But surely, Badiashile should be higher than Trevoh Chalobah on the pecking order of Chelsea’s defenders.
If Chelsea stick with a back three, we would like to see Badiashile join Thiago Silva and Wesley Fofana in the defence.
The aforementioned trio are all centre-halves that are strong on the ball and can defend properly, too.
Let’s try build towards the future with Badiashile as an important piece of that!
We would much prefer him back in the starting line-up for next week’s daunting Premier League trip to leaders Arsenal, who must start as very strong favourites to win.
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