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.
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.