“Isn’t easy” – Chelsea outcast on strange 9 month spell as unwanted asset | OneFootball

The Ben Chilwell story at Chelsea is truly an odd one – he came in and was a key player right away. He played a major part in winning a Champions League title.

He then went through some heavily injury disrupted years, which gradually saw him fade from focus. Then, last summer, he was frozen out entirely in an effort to force him to move on.

The club weren’t able to arrange a sale, so Chilwell was frozen out and trained mostly on his own for the first half of this season, until a loan to Crystal Palace was sorted in January.

He’s gone from a star of the team to someone you forget is on the books – a very strange and slightly sad decline for someone who looked at one point like he’d be an integral starter for many years.

Chilwell explains odd period as Chelsea outcast

Ben Chilwell in action for Crystal Palace against Doncaster Rovers. (Photo by Carl Recine/Getty Images)

If you think it’s been odd for us, imagine what it’s been like for him. Ahead of this weekend’s FA Cup games, he spoke to ITV about his unfortunate final 9 months at the club (for now, at least):

“I was training by myself a lot of the days. You’re not involved in the matchday squads and you kind of just wait for the opportunity for when you’re gonna go somewhere. If you go somewhere in January and you’re miles off the pace, you’ve got to put the work in. The only person who is losing out is you,” the left back explained.

“Training by yourself a lot for a number of months isn’t easy but I think the only thing that was keeping me going was I knew I was going to go somewhere, whether that was January or the end of the season….these past four or five months has given me the opportunity to to mentally and physically realign, refocus and reset to go again.

“There were a lot of circumstances at Chelsea that were not in my control, which I completely respect but the things I could control was how I came into training every day and how I trained, whether it was by myself or with the group. And that is a reflection on myself.”

The good news is that he doesn’t seem to hold a grudge for the way he was treated – at least openly. That’s probably a good thing, as he’s likely to be back in the same situation come the end of the season.