Fikayo Tomori doesn't like playing against Chelsea. His record against the club that helped to develop him is without triumph and each game has been marked by a disappointing mistake to mar the match.
Before he had made an appearance for the first team he scored an own goal against Chelsea for Derby County at Stamford Bridge. Four years later and his next two matches against the Blues resulted in a 5-0 aggregate loss in a reunion that was supposed to prove why Chelsea had made a massive error in selling him.
Ultimately, Tomori's mistakes don't detract from the poor business that getting only £25m for him last summer was, but his performances didn't create the ironic backdrop to Chelsea Vs AC Milan that it could have. Whilst Kalidou Koulibaly returned to form and Thiago Silva continued to grace football with his defensive glory, Tomori was exposed and struggled to assert himself.
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The match at Stamford Bridge, though not his fault, was a feeble display from the Italian champions and Tomori should have cleared Reece James' cross to Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. In the return game, he was the centre of the controversial penalty call that ended up settling the game as a contest.
Tomori was caught wrong side of Mason Mount as the Englishman entered the box and panicked, pulling his shirt and was deemed to have made no attempt to win the ball. Mount's shot was saved but was also hampered by the impact from Tomori and he was duly sent off.
The decision was controversial, and Mount thinks that it was harsh on his former Derby teammate. “He’s obviously my mate, I’ve known Fik for a very long time and I felt for him in that situation," Mount said at full-time. "I was gutted for him. I don’t think it was a sending-off. Was it a penalty? Maybe yes. I’m an honest player and I want to try to score a goal and he pulled me back a little bit, but I feel for him for that decision. It’s a tough one.
“I felt him trying to pull me back, but I was running to goal so I wasn’t going to go down and I felt like I could still have an opportunity to score. So I carried on going, didn’t score and then obviously the ref blew up and gave a pen straight away. I was probably a bit surprised at the time because I’ve still gone through and had a shot.
“It was hard to see him get sent off. You still want to be playing 11 versus 11 and going at it with two good teams, so it maybe ruined the game a bit. It was massive for us and we obviously wanted to win the game, which we did, but I still feel for Fik a lot.”
Mount and Tomori were two of the stars from Chelsea's breakout of youth players in 2019 under Frank Lampard but the defender left last summer after falling out of favour with the current Everton manager following his early season form. He has since gone on to earn a place in Gareth Southgate's England squad but doesn't appear to be as trusted as other centre-backs.
His lapse of concentration and rash decisions in the opening 15 minutes were picked apart by Rio Ferdinand, who agreed with Mount on the penalty call, saying: "Anywhere else on the pitch that is going to be called as a foul, and the rulebook states if there is no intent to play the ball, which isn’t there, you are going to get a red card. The rules are the rules. I don’t necessarily agree, I would feel hard done by, but the rules are the rules."
Joe Cole, also in the BT Sport studio, felt the referee got it right in the end, adding: "It is great movement from Mason, but it is just panic isn’t it really. He feels it’s harsh, but it is a foul."
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