Premier League Hall of Famer, club legend and bang average gaffer
When Frank Lampard was spotted at Stamford Bridge on Tuesday watching Chelsea and Liverpool play out a game that resembled 22 drunks indiscriminately swinging haymakers at each other in a pub car park, only a couple of hacks put two and two together and came up with four. Whether these gentlemen of the press were genuinely “in the know”, or engaging in the kind of ludicrous speculation that earned them the tsunami of ridicule that arrived soon after they published stories announcing Lampard’s possible return to the Chelsea helm on an interim basis, they have every right to feel extremely smug on Thursday.
Rumours that Chelsea were likely to “give it Lamps til end of t’season” grew more legs on Wednesday than a chorus line of Riverdancing millipedes and on Thursday afternoon the inevitable news was finally confirmed. “Chelsea FC has announced that Frank Lampard has been named Caretaker Manager until the end of the season,” honked a club statement issued by Stamford Bridge circus ringmasters Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali. “As we continue our thorough and exhaustive process for a permanent head coach, we want to provide the club and our fans with a clear and stable plan for the remainder of the season. We want to give ourselves every chance of success and Frank has all of the characteristics and qualities we need to drive us to the finish line.”
Given Lampard’s record of previous albeit not entirely abject failure in charge of the club, followed by a far less successful stint overseeing an Everton side he left swirling around the Premier League plughole, Chelsea’s decision to replace Graham Potter with somebody who is demonstrably worse at managing a football club seems completely bonkers, even by the standards of the current Chelsea regime. While he may be “a Premier League Hall of Famer” and club legend who knows or at least once knew the – sound the cliche klaxon! – club, its culture, philosophy and DNA, he is also the bang average gaffer who had a win percentage of less than 17% during his 43 games in charge at Everton, where he was never slow in publicly digging out his own players for what looked suspiciously like his own shortcomings.
Frank’s first order of business before taking training this morning was to meet and greet each member of Chelsea’s famously bloated squad, a task that may have taken several hours even if he knew quite a few of them already. His next job is to disappoint approximately 20 of them by not including them in his squad to travel to Molineux on Saturday. “The top clubs have big squads,” he told the Fourth Estate in his opening presser. “You have to make every player feel included. Being here in the short term is a positive because everyone can have a clean slate. The players will push each other and I will try and manage that.”
While Lampard’s appointment as caretaker manager has prompted much mirth and many raised eyebrows, some of his fabled media cheerleaders have hailed Chelsea’s decision to hire him for the home stretch of the season as being eminently sensible, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. Yes, the fans like him and he might be the man to get a tune out of an uncharacteristically out-of-sorts Mason Mount, but beyond that what exactly will he bring to the party? While Chelsea continue their “thorough and exhaustive” search for a full-time replacement, Frank insists he is not looking to put himself in the frame but could give the club hierarchy plenty to think about by actually winning Big Cup. It shouldn’t happen and it almost certainly won’t happen but this being Chelsea, only a fool would definitively rule it out.
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“Frank was a good person, but he didn’t really speak to me. When I asked what I could do to get a chance, he said: ‘There’s nothing really.’ He said: ‘At your age, I’m not really going to tell you what to improve, what you should work on. You just need to keep going and see what happens’” – Michael Keane, who has come in from the cold since Everton shoved Frank Lampard out the door marked Do One, damns his former manager with the faintest of praise.
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