Lamps is bad cop 99% of the time
ASSISTANT JODY LIFTS LID ON BLUES DOUBLE ACT
CHELSEA’S players have been warned they have got to get nastier – and that’s not just the youngsters.
Frank Lampard’s team have been getting praise for their football this season but a run of five defeats in 11 games has seen their grip on a top-four slot wobble.
But as they prepared for a potentially awkward FA Cup clash against Nottingham Forest tomorrow – and with Lampard himself struggling to shrug off a flu bug – his players got a shot across their bows.
The Stamford Bridge boss took training but assistant Jody Morris – a Chelsea Cup winner as a player in 2000 – spoke in his place and warned his players: “There needs to be ruthlessness to your game.
“You need to be clinical. There are moments where maybe we would like some of them to be more nasty.
“We’ve proved we can be like that. We’ve outfought teams. The relentlessness of our workrate has been good most of the time. But you need to perform when your stock has gone up and people start valuing you as a player more and respecting you more.
“The manager has close relationships with them and when he needs to give some of them a kick up the backside he has no problem doing it.
“We are in a man’s game. We are in big competitions week in, week out – that is what you get at Chelsea. “They are in the first team umbrella now, but it’s not just the young players. The ones that have been inconsistent have not been just the young lads.” But Morris insists that when the rollickings are delivered, it is Lampard and not him dishing them out.
He said:
“There have certainly been moments when Frank is 100 percent the bad cop.
“When there are things that need to be said,
99 percent of the time it’s him that is saying it.”
Forest boss Sabri Lamouchi has saluted Lampard, saying talk of his inexperience is stupid.
The former Inter Milan midfielder said: “Talk about Frank being too young for a job like that is stupid. “You either have quality in the job or you don’t. And he’s clever. He knows the job. He knows the club. He knows the players and he will learn. “And he’s already doing the job with courage.
“He changed the system against Spurs and he started the game against Arsenal with one formation but after half an hour he changed it because of something he saw. “So he doesn’t just have one philosophy. He’s competent and very positive.
“He showed that in the first game when they lost at Manchester United. His management was criticised as was the line-up. Then he won games.
“He knows where he wants to go.”