Football League World
·28 April 2024
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·28 April 2024
The nature of the beast in the EFL means that plenty of players can come and go at a club without any memories being made. Not every transfer is going to work out, understandably so, and this is another prime example of that for Plymouth Argyle.
Timmy Abraham departed Fulham on numerous loan spells with low levels of success, including this brief stint spent down in the south of England with Plymouth.
Timmy Abraham will have had to go through a lot of his career being compared to his brother.
After all, Tammy Abraham has lifted the Champions League as a Chelsea player, gone all the way in the UEFA Europa Conference League and also amassed 11 senior England caps.
Timmy, who is three years younger, is yet to make a significant breakthrough in his professional career.
He may have come through the Fulham academy, but he never once made a senior appearance as a Cottager, before then being sold on to lower-league Walsall in 2022.
Bristol Rovers and Newport County are just two of the other EFL teams for whom he has played.
Abraham is currently on loan at Maidstone United from Boreham Wood, neither of whom he has found the back of the net for.
Signing two players for seven-figure fees in the form of Morgan Whittaker and Bali Mumba is a very current experience for Plymouth supporters.
Rewinding back to 2020/21 and very little, if any, money was spent, with all the new arrivals being either loanees or free transfers.
Abraham falls into the former category, and he arrived at Home Park alongside the likes of Frank Nouble, Panutche Camara and Ryan Hardie.
There were a number of new arrivals in the attacking third in an attempt to replace Ryan Taylor and Joel Grant, to name just a couple of the departing forwards.
Due to his name and the club that he arrived for, the Green Army were hopeful that Abraham could make a real difference to their team’s fortunes.
Little was known about Abraham and yet expectations were high, based on Fulham's standing in the English pyramid alone.
That was far from the case, though, under the management of Ryan Lowe, with the current Preston North End boss making a change as soon as the January transfer window.
In and around Christmas, Abraham returned to Craven Cottage with Wolverhampton Wanderers’ Niall Ennis filling the void and making a much more noteworthy impact.
During his brief and forgettable time as an Argyle player, Abraham, who was just 20 at the time, managed just four appearances.
Two of his three League One outings came as substitutes, the solitary start being as the centre-forward in a 2-0 away defeat at Lincoln City.
Abraham’s fourth Argyle match wasn’t all doom and gloom, playing the full 90 minutes as the club overcame Newport County in the EFL Trophy. In fact, he contributed two assists to the cause at Home Park.
Alongside the previously mentioned names, Luke Jephcott was coming through the academy and accumulating first-team minutes, plus Byron Moore and Dom Telford were another pair of players competing with Abraham for playing time.
It is clear to see that he failed to come out on top in this battle and, whilst there was no obvious reason behind this, one has to assume that the management team had a lot more enough in their other attacking options.
Jephcott was the man to lead Argyle in goals that season, scoring 16 in the league as well as two in the FA Cup, partly explaining why Abraham was unable to feature as much as he would have liked.
When the loan deal was cut short, it felt like the correct decision for all relevant parties given how little he had played for Argyle in the months leading up to Christmas. There was no sign of a breakthrough, so why waste anyone's time?
As was alluded to earlier on, the EFL can be extremely brutal, particularly when it comes to loan moves.
Totalling a mere 171 minutes for a club is no time at all and the loan deal ending in December points to a lack of belief in the player from Argyle’s management. The hope and excitement that the supporters had quickly worn off as a result of his standing in the squad and irregular playing time.
Defender Steven Sessegnon is another Fulham youngster to have made this temporary transfer to Home Park, and he struggled to hit the ground running also. 10 League One appearances for a total of 591 minutes represents a better return than Abraham, but there was still no interest in him remaining with the club, showing that maybe these two clubs don't have the best track-record when it comes to transfers.
Either way, Abraham is not a player that the Devonshire club will remember well and, equally, he surely doesn’t reminisce about his time in green and white.