FOOTBALL

CHELSEA WILL GIVE LAMPS £140K A WEEK

Frank Lampard

Thursday July 3,2008

By Tony Banks

CHELSEA last night offered Frank Lampard a new £140,000-a-week take-it-or-leave-it contract which would make him the highest-paid player in British football, in a desperate bid to keep him out of the clutches of Inter Milan.

The attempt to persuade the England midfielder to stay came after Express Sport revealed yesterday that contract talks had reached deadlock and that Lampard was upset that new manager Luiz Felipe Scolari had not yet contacted him to assure him of his future at the club.

If Lampard accepts, he will move above captain John Terry in the Stamford Bridge pay scale as the highest earner at the club – and in the country.

Terry is on around £135,000 a week, while other stars such as Germany skipper Michael Ballack and Andriy Shevchenko are earning around £130,000 a week.

Chelsea’s dramatic late move appears to be a last-ditch offer to the England midfielder, who is due back for pre-season training on Monday.

But it still does not match his demands of £150,000 a week – although it does signal that at least some of the Chelsea hierarchy, including owner Roman Abramovich, want him to stay.

New manager Scolari, though, has still not spoken to Lampard, who will return from holiday in Sicily tomorrow.

Sources have described the player as “disillusioned” by the silence from the Brazilian and ready to leave. The £8 million signing ofPortugal midfielder Deco earlier this week was hardly a positive sign.

Inter, managed by Lampard’s former mentor Jose Mourinho, are convinced they have clinched a £7m deal for the player with a £6m-a-year contract on offer, although no talks with Lampard have taken place.

One more sign that Scolari has Lampard some way down his list of priorities is that the manager has found the time for talks with centre-back Ricardo Carvalho in a bid to persuade him to stay.

Carvalho is a £24m target for Inter, but Scolari met the Portuguese star last week and begged him to stay at Stamford Bridge.

The fact that the coach went out of his way to do that with another Blues player could spell the end of Lampard’s Stamford Bridge career.

Meanwhile, according to reports in Moscow, Abramovich has told Scolari he wants at least one Russian among the new faces at the Bridge this summer, which could lead to a move for striker Andriy Arshavin, midfielder Yuriy Zhirkov or forward Roman Pavlyuchenko.

Higher up Brazilian Scolari’s list, though, are Samuel Eto’o and Kaka.