Tuesday saw the final deadline for European Championship squads to be named, and, injuries pending, we now know there will be nine Chelsea players in Poland and the Ukraine next month.
John Terry, Frank Lampard, Gary Cahill, Ashley Cole, Raul Meireles, Fernando Torres, Juan Mata, Petr Cech and Florent Malouda have been selected by their respective nations and are all set to play key roles throughout June.
Lampard suffered a thigh injury in England training on Wednesday and is a reported doubt, but otherwise the European Champion contingent are fit and ready to contribute.
Chelsea are the most represented club in the Premier League but trail the likes of Bayern Munich and Real Madrid in overall contribution to the sixteen 23-man squads.
All bar Cahill have featured in a European Championships before, but for the English quartet it’s a first appearance since 2004, as the Three Lions failed to qualify for Austria and Switzerland 2008.
Then, eight Blues took park, with Cech and Malouda joined by Ricardo Carvalho, Paulo Ferreira, Michael Ballack, Claude Makelele, Nicolas Anelka and Khalid Bouhlarouz.
In Portugal four years prior to that, Terry and Lampard were joined by team-mates Joe Cole and Wayne Bridge in Sven-Goran Eriksson’s party, and were four of another total of eight including Marcel Desailly, William Gallas and Jesper Gronkjaer.
It means this year’s selections represent an all-time high for the club, and it could have been higher had Jose Bosingwa not fallen out with the Portuguese management. Daniel Sturridge remains on the England standby list.
As an aside, there is also a healthy group of former Chelsea players heading East, with Damien Duff, Yuri Zhirkov, Arjen Robben, Ricardo Quaresma, Fabio Borini, Andriy Shevchenko, Glen Johnson, Scott Parker and the aforementioned Boulahrouz all confirmed.
Good luck to all of them.
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