Chelsea of England striker, Tammy Abraham has given Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) a date in April 2020 for him to arrive at final decision on whether to switch allegiance to play for the Super Eagles or stick with the country of his birth, megasportsarena.com gathered.
With the lanky striker, whose full names is Kevin Oghenetega Tamaraebi Bakumo-Abraham, back into goals’ scoring form with Chelsea in the English Premier League, interest in his services have been renewed by Nigeria, but the he is still holding out for a return to relevance with England’s Three Lions.
That is now the basis of another stalling approach adopted by Abraham, who was top scorer in the English Championship last season, while on loan at Aston Villa, and has now netted two braces in his first full term with Chelsea, with a haul of four goals from The Blues’ first four matches of the new campaign.
Chelsea’s manager, Frank Lampard has already hinted that Abraham will get a recall to England’s A-squad this month, which must have informed the lad’s decision to stall once again when taken up on a possible switch to Nigeria by NFF president, Melvin Amaju Pinnick.
However, rather than make a categorical statement on his choice, Abraham told Pinnick that he will make a decision on his international future in April 2020, despite pressure from his father, who wants his son to play for Nigeria, but interjected that the choice solely rests with the lad.
Pinnick and Abraham’s dad were at Stamford Bridge on Saturday to watch Chelsea take on Sheffield United, a game in which the lad in question netted his second consecutive brace in the EPL, as he bounced back from a shaky start that saw him lose a crucial penalty in the UEFA Super Cup against Liverpool and fire blanks in The Blues’ first two domestic league matches.
However, despite the obvious cat-and-mouse game Abraham is playing with Nigeria, Pinnick declared emphatically that he and other officials of the NFF will not stop trying to get the star to make the switch, but admitted that many such players who were born abroad are always hard to convince to make the switch, unless they are snubbed by the countries of their birth.
Pinnick told Sporting Life: ”We have been told to wait until April 2020, when he hopes to make a final decision on the matter.
”I told him that he stood a better chance of playing regularly for Nigeria than with England, which has a galaxy of strikers of the English stock
“We will keep talking to good players of Nigeria descent to play for their fatherland. But these kids are very independent minded. But we will not relent in our quest for good players to play for the country and win laurels.”
