Inter aim to turn Moscow into Lampard's Chelsea swansong

Frank Lampard could play his last game for Chelsea in the Champions League final against Manchester United tomorrow after Internazionale stepped up their efforts to sign the midfielder yesterday. The Italian champions have identified Chelsea's contract refusenik as one of their prime targets for next season's rebuilding programme.

Click here for more pictures as the excitement builds in Moscow for the Champions League final

Last night Chelsea strenuously denied reports that a deal for Lampard had already been struck by the club's owner, Roman Abramovich, himself with the Internazionale owner, Massimo Moratti. But Moratti's pursuit of Lampard has become an open secret in Italy after he spoke extensively about the club's plans yesterday after their capture of a third consecutive Serie A title on Sunday.

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Lampard turns 30 next month and, with just one year left on his existing deal, is still holding out on signing a new four-year contract that has been on the table for much of this season. The wages would bring him in line with the club's highest earners – John Terry, Michael Ballack and Andrei Shevchenko – on around £120,000 a week, but Lampard has told the club he would like a five-year deal.

With the club in no mood to budge on the figures or the timespan of the contract – they see it as a take-it-or-leave-it offer – and Lampard still dealing with the death of his mother, Pat, last month, an impasse has been reached. Inter believe they can do the deal for around £11m while Chelsea have insisted that they value the England midfielder much more highly. If the club want to begin a bidding war, however, they will have to discount Barcelona. The Spanish club have indicated that, despite agreeing to release Ronaldinho and Deco, they are not in the market for Lampard.

Chelsea regard the information coming from Milan as unhelpful, to say the least, just one day away from the biggest game in their club's history. Lampard's agent, Steve Kutner, said yesterday no agreement had been reached and that the player would make a decision on his future after his summer holiday. Chelsea have been linked with Roberto Mancini, who has said he will leave Inter this summer, as a potential replacement for Chelsea's manager, Avram Grant. Lampard's former manager Jose Mourinho is a leading contender for the Inter job.

All of which will add to the intrigue around tomorrow's game, which Carlos Tevez described yesterday as an encounter which Chelsea were under much more pressure to win. The United striker offered an outspoken view of his side's opponents at the Luzhniki Stadium, saying: "We are a better side than Chelsea and that is a psychological problem for them."

Tevez is one of those United players who cannot be certain of his place in the United line-up, with Sir Alex Ferguson mulling over whether to select the Argentine, Park Ji Sung or Owen Hargreaves to fill two places. Nevertheless, Tevez said United's victory in the Premier League title race would have an effect on tomorrow's game. "They may say the Premier League is another issue, but we are convinced that it will have an impact on what happens in the final," he said.

"We are favourites and everyone knows it. We are not worried by Chelsea. We are focused but for them it is different. This is more than a final for them. Their whole season rests on the outcome of this game. I am convinced they have more problems in that team. We are under no extra pressure, we feel we have to win every game we play."

The dilemma for Grant when selecting his team rests on two positions in particular: whether he will play Claude Makelele or John Obi Mikel in the holding midfield role; and Salomon Kalou or Florent Malouda on the left wing. Otherwise, the Chelsea manager will pick the usual suspects, with Michael Essien filling in at right-back. His two out of favour Englishmen, Wayne Bridge and Shaun Wright-Phillips, look like they will not even make the seven-man substitutes' bench.

Chelsea may take it as a bad omen that the referee for tomorrow's game is the Slovakian official Lubos Michel, who allowed Luis Garcia's controversial goal to stand in Chelsea's Champions League semi-final defeat to Liverpool in 2005. Chelsea now say that they have sold their 22,000 ticket allocation for the game, despite the prices of flights and Moscow hotel rooms preventing many supporters from making the trip. The club have kept back around 200 tickets for contingency purposes.

The formidable price of getting to the game was demonstrated yesterday by the fact that United had not sold out. Callers to the club's ticket office were being told there were around 45 tickets still on sale in the late afternoon. They are still hopeful of selling those tickets but there is no doubt soaring costs of accommodation in Moscow have prevented United's fans from travelling. Many of the available tickets have come as "returns" from fans who bought them before discovering they could not afford to get to Moscow.

As Chelsea fans ponder the future of Lampard, the Real Madrid coach, Bernd Schuster, said that he did not believe his club had a chance of signing United's Cristiano Ronaldo, despite the player himself announcing he would make a decision on his future after tomorrow's game. Having won La Liga in his first season, Schuster said: "I would like to have a lot of players, but I don't think that it is possible that Cristiano Ronaldo will be with us."