• All rational thought might suggest Lampard has two seasons, at least.
• However, that is not the case with Lampard - Chelsea are a hard-boiled club.
Image: /REUTERS
Everybody thought David Moyes would get time at Manchester United. It was the logical road to travel. He had a six-year contract, he had the support of the club’s sage, Sir Alex Ferguson, and he had Ferguson’s shoes to fill, too. It was always going to be tricky for the first man in, but United had a recent history of giving managers time.
He lasted just over nine months. The lesson here is do not presume. This is the Premier League, 2019. The idea that reason, or fair play, will prevail is quaintly nostalgic. All rational thought might suggest Frank Lampard has two seasons, at least, to shape Chelsea given the club’s present predicament.
He has a transfer ban, he has lost the best player, he is the first coach truly engaging with the youth policy and Chelsea’s current squad is a pale imitation of what went before. Plus, Lampard is a local hero and a novice manager.
Roman Abramovich has never appointed one so raw, so young, or so English. Any cogent analysis of the situation would conclude that Lampard must be indulged, even if his Chelsea team slide into mid-table. Yet that would require senior club officials taking responsibility for a share of the crisis, and that is why Lampard, like Moyes, is not safe.
Subsequent United managers have discovered where the buck stops these days. Not upstairs. United’s recruitment in Moyes’s first summer was poor. The team he inherited from Ferguson needed reshaping and there was no department empowered to deliver that process. It was left to Moyes, who became overwhelmed.
Yet to admit this, to continue with the manager beyond one disappointing season, would be an admission of guilt. Far easier to make a decision that heaps the blame on his shoulders, and make a change, a complete reversal, as if Moyes was the mistake, not the system around him.
That is what the appointment of Louis van Gaal did for United’s executives. It suggested it was the selection of Moyes — a manager whose teams had never challenged for titles, and whose players were not of elite status — that was flawed, and the introduction of a stellar coach like Van Gaal could resolve this.
For the same reason, one imagines if Lampard’s tenure does not work out, his successor will not be a young, English manager from a lower division or lesser club. If this doesn’t work, John Terry will not get a look in for decades. For while Lampard is a coach who is not afraid to give youth its chance, Chelsea’s problems are not of his making.
He was not involved in the narrative that saw Eden Hazard depart to Real Madrid, he did not buy any of the first-team squad, he was not linked to the skulduggery around youth registration that resulted in the transfer ban. Equally, if his team is callow, this is the path Chelsea’s hierarchy has been urging managers along for many years now. The club’s spin on youth involvement is that the executive management is all for it, but successive managers were resistant.
If Lampard does not last in his present role, we will know why. Chelsea’s managers have come second, third, lost a Champions League final, won a Champions League final, and still got sacked. No wonder they have interpreted the message from above as more Mickey Spillane than Mickey and the Gang.
Chelsea are a hard-boiled club and youth development is a revenue stream, not a philosophy that impacts on first-team plans. And then came the transfer ban — just at a time when Chelsea were most in need of rebuilding. This is the job Lampard has inherited and it is much closer in size to Moyes at United in 2013 than the traditional lot at Stamford Bridge.
Someone has messed up and it isn’t Lampard. Do not imagine, though, that the vanity and ego of the modern football executive will ever admit this. If it goes wrong, hero or not, we know who will shoulder the blame.