Didier Drogba departed for the Ivory Coast's African Cup of Nations training camp in Tanzania tonight having urged his Chelsea team-mates to maintain their position at the top of the Premier League in his absence, but with murmurings growing within the first-team squad that attacking reinforcements may be needed next month.
Drogba joins Salomon Kalou, John Mikel Obi and Michael Essien in leaving for the tournament in Angola with the quartet expected to be missing until the visit of Arsenal to Stamford Bridge in the first week of February. With Nicolas Anelka recovering from a small tear in his left hamstring, Carlo Ancelotti will be left with the youngsters Daniel Sturridge and Fabio Borini, neither of whom has scored for the club, to lead the line for the foreseeable future. Yet the manager remains insistent that he will not enter the market next month.
The Italian has stated publicly that he intends to explore different systems of play, aimed at eking more of a threat from midfield, though there is some concern among senior players within the club that too much reliance will still be placed on the youngsters to maintain Chelsea's lead at the top over the next few weeks.
The London club's interest in Atlético Madrid's Sergio Agüero and the Sampdoria forward Giampaolo Pazzini is long established – with this potentially the last transfer window available to the club until 2011 given the threat of Fifa's ban over the Gaël Kakuta affair – and some players would be more reassured if the forward ranks were supplemented with their lead likely to be cut to two points by Manchester United tonight.
Ancelotti is yet to be convinced and has expressed some concern that any player bought in January would simply be left marginalised and among the substitutes when Drogba and Anelka are fit and available. The Ivorian, who scored his 19th of a productive season in the narrow defeat of Fulham on Monday afternoon, used the huddle at the end of the 2-1 victory as an opportunity to urge his club-mates on while he switches his own attentions to international duty. Chelsea had trailed at the interval at Stamford Bridge with confidence fragile after a solitary win in their previous five matches, but rallied to claim the points and suggest momentum has been regained.
Asked what Drogba had been saying to his team-mates on the final whistle, the goalkeeper Petr Cech said: "We knew that this is the point where we could change things around, and we had done just that. Things would have looked worse for us had we not because we would have given Manchester United and Arsenal the chance to come back at us, so we recognised this as an important moment.
"Didier knows that everybody will do his best to make sure that, when he comes back from the African Cup of Nations, we will be in the same position as we are now." When your best goalscorer goes away then you are always going to miss him – just as we will all four of the players who go to Africa because Essien is a great player, and Mikel and Salomon are important to us – but everybody will have his chance to impress the manager and show him they are worth being in the team.
"Whether we buy or not is up to the boss. He is in charge, he knows what he wants to achieve and what he wants to do with his squad. It's his decision and everybody has to respect it."
Michael Ballack, meanwhile, hopes to sign a new two-year contract that would keep him at Stamford Bridge until close to his 35th birthday. Ballack said: "I think I can play the next two years at the highest level with Chelsea. I have never thought of ending my career, whether at the club or with the national team."
Ballack joined Chelsea on a free transfer from Bayern Munich in May 2006 and says he is determined to gain more honours after only winning FA and Carling Cup medals with the London club.
