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There was a statistic flying around this week, one of those made-for-sharing bits of trivia, that every single one of Chelsea’s goals in the Premier League this season has been scored by an English player under the age of 21. Fikayo Tomori has one, Mason Mount three, and Tammy Abraham, the standout story of the nascent campaign, has an impressive seven.

I remember the first time I saw Abraham: a late substitute in a moderately pointless end-of-season game against Liverpool at Anfield. He was 18, then, and had scored some faintly impossible number of goals in Chelsea’s youth teams. There was, even at that stage, something of a buzz about him: the sort of academy player whose name you knew. (As a sophisticated judge of players and renowned spotter of talent, my verdict was that he was very tall).

There was also a sense that he would be something of a test case. Everything seemed to point to the fact that Abraham would make it. Chelsea had invested tens of millions of pounds in its academy, bringing some of the best and brightest youth players from around Europe to the stockbroker belt just outside London. Its youth teams were regularly the best in the country.