Old and new Chelsea meet with the boxoffice return of Frank Lampard
It’s the circle, the circle of life. It moves us all through despair and through hope. Although to be fair, in some cases with a little bit more in the way of the former.
But not today! For he is returned, Chelsea’s own royal blue lion king. As expected, and equally, as massively unexpected, Frank Lampard was unveiled just after lunchtime on Thursday as Chelsea’s new, slightly more permanent caretaker manager.
And so the wheel of Frank continues to turn, just as New Chelsea can now move on into the promised new era of fresh ideas and disruptive thinking, this time by hiring the single most old Chelsea figure imaginable.
Perhaps the next stage in the great moving on could feature Todd Boehly being papped looking mournful on a yacht, or threatening to sue people for saying he’s friends with Vladimir Putin.
It is, of course, all too easy at this point to scoff and mock and snark at the Boehly era’s ongoing hallucinogenic take on the business of running a football club. But nobody could ever accuse the board of being fixed in its thinking. Four days on from the departure of Graham Potter, Chelsea have now rehired the guy they sacked so they could hire the guy who was sacked so they could hire the guy who was just sacked, thereby allowing the rehiring of the guy they sacked before the guy they sacked.
And there was something undeniably more-ish and fun about seeing Frank Lampard back again at the managerial plinth, already in full Chelsea tracksuit with monogrammed FL branding. He looked good too, glossy and fit and impressively re-energised from the slightly ragged version who walked out of Everton, where by the end Lampard would appear on his touchline looking like the kind of pouchy and frazzled middle-aged man you might expect to see wheeling his belongings into the A40 branch of the Big Yellow Storage at 2.30am with a can of energy drink in one hand and a bin bag of regrets in the other.
Lampard said he was honoured and grateful and just here to “help the cause to the end of the season”. He pretended not to be thrilled at being asked about Roberto Di Matteo winning the Champions League and keeping the job. Will you? Really?
There was just a tiny nudge towards his predecessor in the observation that he “knows what Chelsea fans want”, and you knew what he was getting at. It was the closest Lampard got to actually mentioning Potter. Not that he seemed to be snubbing him. You got the feeling he just couldn’t really remember his name.
In fairness, this is a genuinely odd turn all round, New Chelsea plus Old Chelsea, two things that weren’t ever supposed to meet, the football equivalent of the bits in Back to the Future where two versions of Marty or Biff collide on the same timeline, causing a chain reaction that can unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum.
“This is my club,” Lampard said at one point. But is it? New Chelsea is meant to be fresh, divorced from the past, disruptive of the present. This is the same board that also ushered in a new era of stability by giving the new-stability-guy exactly 31 matches, and which on Thursday issued a statement alongside Lampard’s re-unveiling that suggested, apparently not as a joke, that this is all just another step in the masterplan to “provide the club and our fans with a clear and stable plan”.
And yet, we will of course be watching, because this is all box office. There is the prospect of Lampard’s own unprocessed Main Character Energy, a footballing aristo so effortlessly entitled he somehow projects the sense he is being unfairly denied his rightful opportunities even while simultaneously promoted way beyond his objective level purely on the basis of his name and his playing days.
Then, of course, there is the more recent past. “A good thing with me is everyone can have a clean slate,” Lampard noted. But can they? When he was sacked last time there was talk of dressing room complaints, of a lack of tactical instruction, of players being ostracised. “There was a danger of a bit of a divide developing between those playing and those who weren’t,” the Athletic quoted one source as saying. Hmmm. Wait ‘til he gets a load of us.
On the plus side Antonio Rüdiger and Jorginho have left. Lampard had good relations with Kai Havertz and with Mason Mount. He projects well, talks well, has a history of giving good young players a go. Everyone will feel good for at least 10 minutes.
Lampard lasted 84 games previously, with a moderate win ratio. The team looked brittle. But it was undeniably fun. Chelsea conceded 106 goals in those games. Scorelines like 7-1, 4-4 and 5-3 kept popping up. Most concerning right now, Chelsea were taken apart 4-1 in the Covid summer Champions League by Bayern Munich. Lampard’s first big job will be to pick a team to face Real Madrid and Carlo Ancelotti, with whom there will be warm hugs and talk of respect. But Ancelotti is also utterly ruthless, and in charge of a team that beat Barcelona 4-0 on Wednesday night. The nostalgia tour starts here. It might be quite a brief little trip.