DE STROYED
Defiant Lampard vows to battle for his job as City dazzler De Bruyne piles on pressure
FRANK LAMPARD insists he is ready to fight for his job at Chelsea after another defeat piled even more pressure on him.
Deadly Kevin De Bruyne dazz l ed f or rampant Manchester City at Stamford Bridge as Lampard suffered a fourth defeat in six Premier League games.
City’s first-half masterclass saw goals from Ilkay Gundogan, Phil Foden and De Bruyne.
Chelsea boss Lampard admitted he expects the heat to be on his position but claims he must be given time.
And he insists it’s unrealistic to make the London club title contenders despite their massive £200million summer spending spree.
Lampard said: “We have to keep fighting and I am the first one who has to keep fighting.
“I’ll always feel heat and I felt heat when we were on a good run because I knew that round the corner there could be a negative. I will never speak for people on the board. I can’t do that.
“As much as I can’t answer the questions a while ago about if I would get a new contract, I can’t answer now about the difficult run of results.
“I can only speak as I see it, as the manager of the club.
“There is never going to be an upward trajectory that goes up and up.
“When we had an unbeaten run of 16 games, great – but I still saw the flaws. I still tried to work on them then as I am trying to do now. Nothing can distract me from that.”
Lampard is one of the club’s greatest ever players but knows from past experience that sitting in the hotseat is always going to be difficult.
Lampard adde d : “I understand it, I played here for a long time and the minute you lose games in a short period of time, then everyone looks and asks questions.
“The expectations are different this year because everyone says, ‘ You spent this amount of money’ when the reality is that a lot of the players who have come in are new, young and have been injured.”
Gundogan’s low finish and Foden’s first-time strike, set up by De Bruyne, had them cruising and the Belgian made it three goals in 16 minutes after Raheem Sterling hit the post. Callum Hudson-Odoi got one back in injury-time for Blues as City went up to fifth. De Bruyne starred as a central striker for Covid-hit City and admitted: “It was a little bizarre in the beginning. I’ve done it a couple of times in my career.
“There are a lot of strikers, forward players who are out.
“The coach asked me to do this job so I tried to do it as best as possible, and it is good we won in this way. “I think it is important we win one of these big games. “In the last year we have played some good games but we’ve not won one of them. “We showed we can win the big games and we’re still fighting. It’s an uphill battle but we’re coming closer, that’s the only thing we can do right now. “In the years we were the champions we were winning these big games. “It’s important. It’s a little bit different this year because everybody is losing points and we had a bad start.” Boss Pep Guardiola said: “We played really well. The result is fantastic.”