We always knew that this was going to be a difficult season to judge the performance of Chelsea’s players and manager by. Somehow, six months into the season and approaching the home straight, it’s become even harder to make that judgment. Were the team over performing earlier on in the season, when Champions League qualification looked like a certainty and third place wasn’t out of the question? Or are they underperforming now, with the wheels coming off the club’s league campaign and the Champions’ League spot under severe threat?
Now seems like the pertinent time to ask this question. In the aftermath of Chelsea’s surprising and disappointing loss at home to Manchester United, we saw the first signs of dissent from Stamford Bridge fans. Some of them walked out early. Others, like one particularly irate gentleman, called prominent phone-in radio shows to loudly demand that Lampard be fired immediately. That’s an overreaction, but there’s a general feeling around the club’s supporters that the legendary Blues midfielder’s honeymoon period as the boss might be coming to an end.
If this game proves to be a turning point, that’s probably unfair to Lampard. On another night, Chelsea would have won that game. There are cases to be made for both of the team’s disallowed goals to have stood, and an even stronger case to be made for the idea that Harry Maguire shouldn’t have been on the pitch after appearing to deliberately place one of his boots into the groin of Michy Batshuayi. The fact that Maguire went on to score one of United’s goals added insult to injury, and suddenly Chelsea was on the wrong side of a two-nil defeat after never really appearing to be in trouble before their opponents scored the first goal.
Going back to what we said at the start of this article, this is a strange season to judge Chelsea’s progress on. We were probably too harsh to Maurizio Sarri, who took the club to the EFL Cup final and delivered the Europa League. Had Sarri not been made to feel so unwelcome earlier on in the campaign, as the team was adjusting to his style, he might still be at Stamford Bridge now building on the success of last season. He went to Juventus instead, and now Lampard is here. As great a player as he was for Chelsea, he’s also a young and inexperienced manager and was initially hamstrung by the fact that the club wasn’t allowed to buy players.
Unable to improve the squad through signings, most Chelsea fans started the season hoping to see Lampard develop the team’s younger players, and play attacking football. If you’d offered a sixth-place finish to most fans back in August, they’d have taken it. Lampard has mostly delivered on that promise. Tammy Abraham looks a natural fit at Premier League level in a way that many people never thought would be possible. Mason Mount has taken his chance with both hands and become the first name on the team sheet. Tomori, James, Hudson-Odoi – the list goes on. Chelsea has a core of young English players, and they play adventurous football. All of those early-season boxes have been ticked.
Where it might have gone wrong for Chelsea – and perhaps also for Lampard – is what happened when the club won their appeal and regained the ability to sign players. Everyone expected money to be spent on strengthening the squad – especially the forward line, where it was obvious that goals would be hard to come by if anything were to happen to Tammy Abraham. Inexplicably, Lampard (or perhaps Abramovich) didn’t do this. There were whispers of the team bringing in a striker on deadline day, but instead, it looked more likely that they would let one go in the shape of Olivier Giroud. Ultimately, Giroud ended up staying.
Abraham is inevitably now injured, having played far too much football this season and driven his body into the ground. Giroud, despite seemingly being held hostage at the club, still can’t get into the starting lineup for love nor money. Against Manchester United, Michy Batshuayi was selected as a starter. The same Batshuayi who was farmed out on loan to Borussia Dortmund because he wasn’t good enough for the Chelsea team two years ago. The same Batshuayi who was sent back early from his loan at Valencia last season because he was underperforming, and then spent the final few months of the season at Crystal Palace. Michy Batshuayi’s record in the Premier League for Chelsea at the time of writing is six goals in forty-six games. He may be a Premier League quality player on his better days, but he’s not a Chelsea quality player. If Lampard should carry the blame for anything, it’s not improving the squad when the opportunity presented itself.
Is there a solution to all of the above? Probably not. Chelsea’s young players will take time to mature. Performances will fluctuate. Candidates to improve the team are hard to come by. It’s difficult to see how getting rid of Lampard would make matters any better. It would be as big a gamble as betting fifteen million pounds on an online slots game. That isn’t a comparison we’ve made by accident – fifteen million pounds is the prize money teams receive for qualifying for the Champions League, and playing UK Online Slots is as unknowable a process as changing manager in the middle or later stages of a season. Just like a smart online slots player, we want to chase the jackpot, but we have to exercise caution and know when the appropriate time to go big is.
There is every possibility that Lampard is struggling. He’s never managed in the Premier League before. He’s never dealt with the expectation that comes with managing one of the biggest clubs in Europe before. More relevantly, he hasn’t dealt with a sudden loss in form before. We’re all about to find out how he deals with it and how he responds to that pressure. We’ll be finding that out about him at the same time as he finds it out about himself – which isn’t an ideal process – but nothing about Chelsea’s circumstances coming into this season was ideal. Lampard should only be fired at the end of this season if we end on a long run of defeats. Sacking him earlier than that would be reckless, and probably counterproductive.
