Chelsea confident Essien will sign

CHELSEA are quietly confident they can land Michael Essien in the next few days, although the club are taking nothing for granted in a transfer saga which has rumbled on for most of the summer.

Chief executive Peter Kenyon is expected to depart for France in the next 48 hours as the Premiership champions continue their relentless pursuit of the 22-year-old Ghanaian international.

The long-running battle to convince Lyon to sell the midfielder has been afflicted by more twists than an Alfred Hitchcock thriller. But it appears to have finally dawned on the French champions that Essien no longer has any desire to play for the club.

Club president Jean-Michael Aulas has been the biggest barrier to a swift conclusion from his reluctance to drop below the ludicrously high valuation of €45 million to his almost daily rhetoric on how Chelsea were destroying their chances of landing the player by their failure to close the deal to his satisfaction.

Aulas then insisted on handing Chelsea a deadline and then declaring that, in his eyes at least, any chance of a deal with the Londoners would not go ahead. Yet two days later, Aulas was forced to pick up the telephone and contact Chelsea’s billionaire owner Roman Abramovich, who with splendid irony, was holidaying close by in St Tropez.

The meeting between the two was certainly no secret and was held with the full backing and knowledge of Kenyon, who had been continuing dialogue with the French club despite the verbal posturing delivered daily by Aulas. It had been a brief yet brutal conversation with the Ghanaian player which finally brought Aulas back to the negotiating table.

Aulas had decreed, via yet another of his outbursts, that he would keep Essien by offering the player a massive pay rise and a contract which would tie him to Lyon until 2009.

What Aulas had clearly failed to establish before he allowed his words to be electronically dispatched around the world, was to ascertain whether the player would be at all interested in staying under those terms.

When Aulas did get around to asking the right questions to the man in the middle of the saga, he found Essien, not surprisingly, in an uncompromising mood. Talks remain ongoing but as so often in this long-running saga, the outcome may still be to close to call given Aulas’ propensity for knee-jerk reactions.

But in London, as in France, Chelsea continue to work diligently to bring an end to the marathon affair and would now appear to be closer than ever before given Essien’s refusal to discuss a new contract at Lyon.

Jose Mourinho has remained confident he would get his man, even after Aulas declared there was no chance of a deal earlier this week. The Portuguese coach wants the youngster to bolster his midfield and his acquisition will be Chelsea’s final move into the transfer market until the window opens again in January.