‘I’d like to play forever’
Manchester City’s Lampard heads across ocean to MLS with no regrets
LONDON — He won them all did Frank Lampard. He took the lot: the Champions League, the Europa League, the Premier League (three times), the FA Cup (four times), the League Cup (twice).
He has what he terms the “full set” and yet it is not his greatest achievement. No, for him, that is far more basic and far more fundamental.
“Whether or not I had the full set, the one regret I would have had is if I hadn’t worked hard enough to try and get every bit out of it (my career),” he says. “And I think that I did that. Even if I didn’t have the full set, then I could still have walked away and said, ‘it’s as good as I could have done.’ So, no, I have no regrets.”
Lampard, 37 next month, will walk away Sunday afternoon at the Etihad Stadium in Manchester City’s final home match against Southampton, as he says his goodbyes to English soccer before embarking on a new life in the United States with the newly-formed MLS club New York City.
In the same breath, Lampard can declare himself “veryready” and “quitecomfortable” to be bringing the curtain down on his career at the very highest levels of club soccer and yet can add: “I’m not looking for the end at the minute. I’d like to play forever, really.”
It sometimes feels that Lampard has played forever, has been around forever, has been a constant in the English game and in the Premier League. To do so he has shown remarkable powers of recovery — and of resilience.
“With careers and where I am now, it’s easy to look back on various phases,” he explains. “I had a phase when I felt on top of my game for a few years and nothing could break me. I didn’t have to think; I just played.
“Then you get parts of your career where every bad game people write you off, managers come in with slightly different ideas. But I just took it all on the chin as I got older and from the age of around (age) 32, 33, it was going to be a different career for me and looking back from that stage they were probably my most successful years.
“I won the Champions League (2012), the Europa League (2013), broke the personal goal scoring record at Chelsea (an astonishing return of 211 goals in 648 appearances) — all those things happened under adverse times under managers like (Rafa) Benitez who were not picking me as regularly as before.
“But if you are going to play for nearly 20 years, you are not going to have it all your own way but if you keep your head down and work you get to where you want to be. The main thing is that players grow up with respect for the people around them, their teammates, the fans, clubmates and work hard. And if they do that then I can cut them some slack along the way they just have to get the basics. And good old-fashioned basics do go a long way.”