Tammy Abraham has revealed that the racist abuse he received on Twitter after missing a penalty for Chelsea in the UEFA Super Cup against Liverpool drove his mum to tears.
The 21-year-old stepped forward to take Chelsea’s fifth penalty but saw his effort saved by Adrian before Mohamed Salah converted his spot-kick to hand Liverpool a 5-4 shootout win.
Abraham was racially abused on Twitter after the game and his teammate Kurt Zouma and Manchester United midfielder Paul Pogba have also been targeted by online trolls this season.
Chelsea announced after the incidents involving Abraham and Zouma that they intended to meet with Twitter in order to find out what they plan to do in order to eradicate racist abuse on their platform.
Speaking to CNN, Abraham said: ‘I remember speaking to my mum, she was emotional, she was in tears. You know, she’s just thinking: ‘Why him? Why him?’ It’s obviously not nice to hear, especially seeing your son getting abused.
‘For me, I’m always a strong character, it doesn’t affect me as much. But saying that, it could affect people who don’t have my personality. It was a challenging moment for me, I went through a lot of emotions.
‘Everyone misses penalties but to miss a penalty I was obviously devastated.’
Lampard decided to leave Abraham on the bench for the following game against Leicester City before recalling him to the starting line-up for matches with Norwich City and Sheffield United.
Abraham responded by scoring twice in each game, meaning only Sergio Aguero (six), Teemu Pukki and Raheem Sterling (both five) have netted more goals in the Premier League this season.
And the England international admitted that the support from Lampard and the rest of his teammates helped him to get through a challenging time.
‘Straight after, the boys, manager and everyone at Chelsea had my back. The next day, [Lampard] called me to find out how I was,’ he said.
‘He didn’t want to go over the situation because he knew how I was feeling, but just wanted to find out how I was, make sure that I wasn’t distracted from football and my personal life was all right.
‘It’s nice to have that support behind you when you’re going through times like that.’
Kick It Out said in a statement last week: ‘We are inviting the football authorities – including the Football Association, the Premier League and the English Football League – to meet Twitter alongside Kick It Out and to agree a collective action plan of what will be done to tackle online discrimination effectively.’
