Ian Wright thinks Chelsea’s players will be baffled by Aubameyang being overlooked

Ian Wright thinks Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s team-mates will be struggling to understand why the striker is not getting into the Chelsea starting line-up under Graham Potter.

Aubayemang was reunited with Thomas Tuchel at Stamford Bridge last summer, only for the German coach to be sacked the following week.

Since then, Aubameyang has fallen down the pecking order and was left off Chelsea’s Champions League squad list last month, while his brief cameo appearance off the bench in Sunday’s 2-0 defeat at Tottenham was his first outing for the club in over a month.

Aubameyang has become a peripheral figure at Chelsea, and Wright cannot fathom the logic behind him being continually overlooked considering the Blues have scored just one league goal in their last five matches. He has suggested that Potter may have a personal issue with Aubameyang, but has called for the Chelsea boss to put this behind him to get his side firing in front of goal once more.

‘Whatever the problem is with Aubameyang… George Graham didn’t have a problem not speaking to a player for months but if he needed him he’s in,’ Wright told Premier League Productions.

Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang has hardly featured for Chelsea in recent weeks

Graham Potter’s side are struggling for goals, but Aubameyang is still being overlooked

Ian Wright thinks Chelsea’s players will be struggling to understand why he’s not playing

‘I don’t know what’s gone on but Chelsea need a striker, they’ve got one and he’s not playing.

‘You wouldn’t say it to the manager but the lads will talk about it. You’d talk to Aubameyang and say “we can’t understand why you’re not playing”.

‘You’d be saying that to him because the Chelsea players know they need him right now. They’ll be saying that.

‘You don’t know what’s happened with the boss, you don’t know why he’s not playing but the players themselves will be saying “how come you’re not playing, what’s going on?”‘

Chelsea’s loss to Tottenham was their fourth in the league since the turn of the year, and they are also trailing in their Champions League last-16 tie against Borussia Dortmund after the first leg.

The pressure is mounting on Potter to get things right after the club spent £323m in January.

Wright firmly believes that Chelsea have the players to turn things around by providing service for Aubameyang if he is brought back in from the cold.

‘They’ve got a lot of creativity when it comes to Chelsea,’ he said.

‘What would be the point of having those two guys (Reece James and Ben Chilwell) who do attack with gusto, they get round those inverted wingers when they can to put the ball into who?

‘Now whatever you’re saying about Aubameyang, whatever they think about Aubameyang, he is a goalscorer.

‘If you get them two back fit, you get him up there all of a sudden Reece James has got someone to whip it into, Chilwell has got someone to whip it into. Then you’ve got (Enzo) Fernandez who can find him over the top.

‘There’s so many things where I was thinking this could go right for them.’