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<\/p>\nThe 21-year-old had looked like his Chelsea days were numbered before making breakthrough under Frank Lampard.<\/p>\n
For two-and-a-half years, Tomori spent time on loan with Brighton, Hull City and most recently Derby County.<\/p>\n
His time with Derby under Frank Lampard was very much the making of him as he so nearly guided them to the Premier League.<\/p>\n
Speaking with Football. London, Tomori said while at the Rams, as a championship player, he was always focused on improving himself and ensuring he was ready to step up if given the opportunity.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cI think when you go on loan you\u2019re obviously still a Chelsea player so that\u2019s still in the back of your mind.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll I was focused on was doing well for myself and Derby at the time. Obviously we had a good season and made the play-off final and I did well for myself too so that was good.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that every single player that goes on loan from Chelsea, the end goal is to make it back into the team and I\u2019ve been fortunate enough to get a taste of that this season.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost importantly when I was on loan at Derby I was making effort to try and develop myself as much as possible, try and learn the game a bit more and if the time did come to come back to Chelsea, that I\u2019d be fully prepared and more prepared than if I went somewhere else for example.<\/p>\n
Asked how much Frank Lampard\u2019s faith in him meant, he said: \u201cA great deal.<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously last year playing a 20-21-year-old in the heart of the defence for a top Championship club like Derby, it does take faith and he put that in me from the beginning and told me what he wanted from me in training and in games.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor him to have that faith in me when results weren\u2019t good or I wasn\u2019t playing as well as I could have, was all I could really ask. Then it was on me to try and produce what he wanted.<\/p>\n
\u201cComing to Chelsea this season it wasn\u2019t granted that just because he was the manager, I had to work hard and I\u2019m still working hard to try and maintain high standard to maintain my place in the team.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is a level up and there\u2019s more experienced players in the team so that\u2019s what I\u2019m focusing on.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Chelsea Defender, Fikayo Tomori has opened up on his time at Derby County and the faith Blues manager Frank Lampard has shown in him The 21-year-old had looked like his Chelsea days were numbered before making breakthrough under Frank Lampard. For two-and-a-half years, Tomori spent time on loan with Brighton, Hull City and most recently […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":158626,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[2658,13125,12101],"class_list":["post-158797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-a","tag-fikayo-tomori","tag-frank-lampard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=158797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158797\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/158626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=158797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=158797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=158797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}