Racism has always been rampant within football – and Chelsea striker Tammy Abraham is no stranger to it.
He talks about his experience with racism he faced during a Chelsea game. Back in August, when Abraham was playing in the UEFA Super Cup match against Liverpool, he wasn’t able to get the penalty kick right and missed the ball going into the net. Chelsea ended up losing 5-4 penalties to the Reds after a 2-2 draw.
For that, he received hurls of racist abuse for days and many debated whether he was good enough for the Blues even or not. Abraham remembers his confidence in himself being thoroughly shaken after the incident.
“The season before at Villa, I had only missed one out of eight or nine so I had confidence,” Abraham said on the official Chelsea site. “I remember walking up and the pressure got to me, nobody had missed up to that point so I knew I had to score.
“I had what I wanted to do in my head but I changed my mind when I was taking the run-up. Afterwards in the changing room, everyone came round me saying ‘don’t worry, it happens to the best players’ but at the time I just didn’t want to hear it. I wanted everyone to leave me alone, I was in tears.
“I lost a lot of confidence after that. I was doing well on my loans but when I came back to Chelsea, it just wasn’t working – I couldn’t get my first goal, I couldn’t do anything. In my head I was wondering if it was worth all the stress because I was getting abused on Twitter, a lot of racist comments, people saying I wasn’t good enough to be playing for Chelsea. It was the biggest down in anything I’ve done in football.”
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