Lampard feeling the strain as club draw a blank in January window
Inactivity in the transfer market has left Chelsea’s young manager still looking to make his first signing at Stamford Bridge while fighting for a Champions League place
Gonzalo Higuain was, Chelsea’s director and general overlord Marina Granovskaia said on Jan 23 last year, the club’s primary target in that transfer window and when the then 31-year-old arrived – to no great enthusiasm – she added that the loan had not been easy to agree.
Even at the time, six months into Maurizio Sarri’s short-lived spell in charge, it was already becoming clear his was unlikely to be a long-term appointment, just as one year previous the Antonio Conte regime was stretching mutual levels of tolerance. Yet Granovskaia and Chelsea sanctioned the acquisition of Higuain for what was to be a forgettable sinecure in English football, a signing they never wanted for a manager in whom there was dwindling faith.
One year earlier, the club had signed, among others, Olivier Giroud from the Arsenal substitutes’ bench, a Europa League player for what was to become – in the following season at least – a Europa League club.
In those two January windows, these were short-term signings that fitted the short-term nature of the managers of the time, both of them with qualities albeit not necessarily suited to Chelsea in that era. Conte: disputatious, impatient, disapproving. Sarri: off-message, unco-operative, single-minded. Yet both got their January players.
How, then, should Frank Lampard read the big picture of last month, a transfer-window blank for Chelsea that would be notable in itself even without the 12 months that have preceded it? He seemed to be choosing his words carefully before and after yesterday’s draw with Leicester City.
After all, this was not just his January window, it was his summer 2019 window, too, the latter struck out by that Fifa transfer embargo. It was a month for which any club would have been planning the moment they knew the scope of their punishment and the possibility of its mitigation.
It was not, as Lampard has said, simply about the acquisition of new players, but the trading out of those whose time has come and gone. Part of the undoing of Mauricio Pochettino across those two barren windows at Tottenham Hotspur was not only those his club did not sign, but those who should have left. Every club needs the purging of those no longer required – for the benefit of both parties. Some, perhaps all, of Pedro, Giroud, Marcos Alonso – even Willian, in the last six months of his contract – might have gone. Instead, they remain refugees from former eras, and that can change the mood around a training ground.
Remarkably, it can still be overlooked that Eden Hazard departed last summer, the greatest player of the past 10 years at Chelsea and arguably the most talented individual in the Premier League. Who is his replacement?
Two windows since the little maestro left, Lampard has not signed a single player of his choosing. Christian Pulisic was the club’s pick. Mateo Kovacic was already at the club, and the only legitimate signing Chelsea could make.
There were good players to be signed last month, although not many.
Borussia Dortmund’s acquiescence to whatever were the demands of Mino Raiola for Erling Haaland already looks like the smartest money. Chelsea have been bruised by justifiable criticism in the past that they have signed established players instead of developing their own. Now their problem is reversed. There is at last an established academy pathway to the first team and rather it is senior players, from the Conte era especially, who need moving on and replacing.
It was once a thing of wonder that Arsene Wenger would take a look at the market in some windows and arrive at the conclusion that there was not a single player available at an acceptable fee who would prove a playing and financial asset to an Arsenal team fighting for fourth place. The same conclusion seems to have been reached at Chelsea – a young team fighting for fourth, academy assets fully exploited, injuries starting to take their toll – and yet not a single player who might improve them.
Not just Dries Mertens or Edinson Cavani, but the scores of players who a recruitment department at a club of Chelsea’s size and sophistication should be able to identify. “We’ve probably become the underdogs and the outsiders because the teams around us have strengthened,” Lampard reflected on Friday before the Leicester game. “It’s a fact.”
A mild way of putting it, all told. A manager tiptoeing around the politics of a powerful club sensitive to criticism, run on behalf of an absentee owner. What it will mean for Lampard and how he is judged come the summer is not clear. Are they still a Champions League club, or are Chelsea back to the days of buying Europa League players for Europa League campaigns?
One can only presume the club have something bold planned for the summer, although by then the picture will have shifted again. Lampard needs a strong first season and Champions League football that will empower Chelsea in the summer market. What will be the implications for their manager if this side falter? Chelsea look at Jurgen Klopp’s first Liverpool window, January 2016, when his club kept their powder relatively dry for the summer that followed, although the German was not a rookie top-flight manager in just his second season.
It has not helped that academy graduates Tariq Lamptey and Clinton Mola have also departed, although that kind of thing happens to big clubs a lot now. It is the inactivity that sends a mixed message when there is so much to play for. Hard to understand how not one signing was accomplished. What, one asks, has Petr Cech, the club’s technical and performance director, been occupying himself with these past six months?
He will know as well as Lampard the pressures that a manager faces at Chelsea and how the favour of Roman Abramovich is expressed in which players he signs and how much he is prepared to spend on them. Meanwhile, Lampard is still waiting for his first signing.