Liam Rosenior has ended Axel Disasi’s first-team exile following productive talks with the Chelsea outcast, but Raheem Sterling remains in the cold for now.
Disasi had been working separately under Rosenior’s predecessor Enzo Maresca, with Tuesday marking exactly a year since the 27-year-old Frenchman last appeared for the Blues.
However, Rosenior has allowed Disasi to return to his training sessions, though he will not be able to face Cypriot outfit Pafos in the Champions League on Wednesday night.
As for Sterling, Rosenior says he and the club are speaking with the 31-year-old Englishman, who, essentially, is now the last-remaining member of the so-called ‘bomb squad’.
Rosenior said: ‘Raheem, at the moment, we’re in conversations about different things and different options that are going on in his career. Hopefully that will be clearer in the next few days.’
On Disasi, who could still leave Chelsea this month with several clubs interested, he added: ‘My decision on Axel, I had a really good meeting with him a couple of days ago.
Axel Disasi has been brought in from the cold after being bundled into Chelsea’s bomb squad
But Liam Rosenior has reintegrated the defender, left out under his predecessor Enzo Maresca
‘I wanted to catch up with him, see where he was in terms of his career. I said to the players when I came in, “It’s a clean slate for everybody.” So it was only right for me to have a conversation with him – a really good conversation. I got to know him really, really well.
‘It was the right thing to be back involved with the group. Because of the situation he’s been in, he’s behind in terms of his fitness, his match fitness, and we’ll keep working with him really, really hard to get him up to speed.’
Meanwhile, Rosenior described rumours linking Enzo Fernandez with Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid as meaning ‘nothing to me’, with the Blues boss focusing only on enjoying a ‘long term’ future with the Argentinian World Cup winner.
Fernandez managed 85 minutes in Saturday’s Premier League win over Brentford despite being ill at the time amid the virus that has spread through the camp.
On the transfer talk surrounding Fernandez, Rosenior said: ‘It means nothing to me. When you’re a world-class player, an outstanding player, there’s always going to be speculation that you can’t control.
‘He’s been outstanding in the time I’ve worked with him. He’s even surprised me in a good way in terms of what he did on Saturday to be ill and cover the ground that he did.
‘He’s a Chelsea player. He’s very, very important to me. I think we’re going to have a really, really good, hopefully winning, relationship moving forward in the short term and the long term.’
