Chelsea No2 Steve Clarke admits Andriy Shevchenko is facing a battle to get back into Jose Mourinho's first team thinking.
The £30.8million misfit has yet to even make the bench for Chelsea this term after falling further down the strikers' pecking order behind new signing Claudio Pizarro.
"He's got to wait for his opportunity and, when he gets it, he has to take it.
"That's the situation with a lot of players at the club. Didier Drogba is the striker, Pizarro has come in and done very very well.
"Salomon Kalou played the first game and I thought he was probably our best, most exciting and dangerous player.
"So there are another three strikers there as well as Shevchenko.
"All the players who are not in the team want to play. You train all week and at the end of it you want to be on the pitch.
"If they're not selected they're disappointed. But that's a normal situation when you have the squad of players we have."
Dinamo Kiev made several attempts to take Shevchenko, 31, on loan and were willing to pay his £120,000-a-week wages - but Chelsea refused to let him go.