RONAN O’GARA’S rise has shown a successful coach is also a good storyteller, capable of corralling their disparate squad around a single, coherent narrative. For O’Gara and his La Rochelle players, their story was climbing Everest and daring to walk across the corpses of those who had previously tried and failed.
Storytelling should be an arena in which Frank Lampard excels, given his brief spell as a children’s author before throwing himself into management.
Lampard wrote a series of football-inflected children’s tales titled Frankie’s Magic Football, in which the titular hero Frankie leans on his friends to save the day and learn some important life lessons along the way.
Frankie Saves Christmas, for instance, is a parable about team-work and putting individual egos to one side, in which Frankie and his friends have to work with Santa and seven of his reindeer – named Pele, Ronaldo, Zidane, Crespo, Lineker, Cantona and Cruyff – to rescue stolen presents from the evil Krampus and Maradona, the latter a reindeer who turned rogue having been denied a promised promotion to the front of Santa’s sleigh. (We won’t spoil the ending.)
Sadly for the author, what cultural footprint his book left did not reach the Chelsea dressing room.
Pound-for-pound, Chelsea’s 2022/23 season is the worst in Premier League history. Self-styled disruptors Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali stumped up for an unprecedented £600 million transfer splurge to first bloat and then ruin the squad, along with £45 million to sack Thomas Tuchel, hire Graham Potter, and then sack him.
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The season’s bare numbers are an indictment. Chelsea finished 12th in the Premier League with 44 points, scoring 38 goals in 38 games and finishing 30 points worse off than last season.
To placate the fans still pining for Tuchel, Boehly and co. turned to Frank Lampard, a man who has already failed at being Chelsea manager. The absurdity of the situation was summed up when Lampard sat at a press conference in the Bernabeu and was unable to categorically deny he was recommended for the job by James Corden.
Lampard was a total flop. Chelsea were knocked out of the Champions League with a whimper and their closing run in the league was a horror show, collecting all of five points from nine games. For Lampard, this is a regrettable consistency. Across his last 38 games as a Premier League manager with Everton and Chelsea, he has picked up 34 points.
Lampard left by assuming the role piloted last year by Ralf Rangnick: the interim-manager-cum-pundit.
“The standards collectively have dropped. I can be honest about that now that it’s my last game, I might not see some of them that much anymore. If you’re not together in the dressing room, and you’re not vocal in the dressing room, driving each other and competitive because I want your place and you want mine. Any top team has to have that.”
As limited a manager as Lampard is proving to be, this iteration of the Chelsea job was an impossible task. This season might be the first in which the players lost the dressing room: Chelsea stockpiled so many of them that some had to get changed in the corridor.
Keeping an enormous squad of expensively-assembled international players happy and coherent is a difficult job, and it’s why Pep Guardiola prefers to work with a relatively slender squad. Guardiola says telling a hard-working player he will not play the next game “kills” him, how brutal it is to ask a player to move his family to a new country with an unfamiliar culture and language to play football only to then deny him the chance to play. That may be leavened with some typical Pep melodrama but there is an undeniable truth to it.
The incoming Mauricio Pochettino will demand a trimmed squad, but offloading players is a lot more difficult to do in practice than in theory, and the most likely to leave are academy stars like Mason Mount.
They also genuinely need to sign some more players, with a priority on a striker, a goalkeeper, and a central midfielder. They will have to do this without any European football, which has hit broadcasting income by about 25%.
There are other concerns, too, as the entire Boehly Era has been predicated on risk. Tying young players to eight-year contracts over which transfer fees are spread makes sense if that player is sold for a high price. For that to happen, they have to be a success at the club, and this season has shown that is not a guarantee.
The scale of this shambles raises another question: for how much longer will Boehly accept his role as the public face of all of these mistakes? Boehly is not exactly publicity-shy but he is not the only man in charge at Chelsea, he is co-owner along with Behdad Eghbali and so they both own this failure.
A season as bad as this is a stress test on any working relationship, and Liverpool fans who remember the George Gillett/Tom Hicks circus will attest to how badly things can go wrong when trust breaks down at the highest level.
Nothing currently suggests that anything like that will happen at Chelsea, but not all of the freshman-year bumbling can be written off. If Pochettino cannot turn things around, the next story told about Chelsea could be grisly.
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Lampard flopped again at Chelsea - but it wasn't solely his fault
RONAN O’GARA’S rise has shown a successful coach is also a good storyteller, capable of corralling their disparate squad around a single, coherent narrative. For O’Gara and his La Rochelle players, their story was climbing Everest and daring to walk across the corpses of those who had previously tried and failed.
Storytelling should be an arena in which Frank Lampard excels, given his brief spell as a children’s author before throwing himself into management.
Lampard wrote a series of football-inflected children’s tales titled Frankie’s Magic Football, in which the titular hero Frankie leans on his friends to save the day and learn some important life lessons along the way.
Frankie Saves Christmas, for instance, is a parable about team-work and putting individual egos to one side, in which Frankie and his friends have to work with Santa and seven of his reindeer – named Pele, Ronaldo, Zidane, Crespo, Lineker, Cantona and Cruyff – to rescue stolen presents from the evil Krampus and Maradona, the latter a reindeer who turned rogue having been denied a promised promotion to the front of Santa’s sleigh. (We won’t spoil the ending.)
Sadly for the author, what cultural footprint his book left did not reach the Chelsea dressing room.
Pound-for-pound, Chelsea’s 2022/23 season is the worst in Premier League history. Self-styled disruptors Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali stumped up for an unprecedented £600 million transfer splurge to first bloat and then ruin the squad, along with £45 million to sack Thomas Tuchel, hire Graham Potter, and then sack him.
The season’s bare numbers are an indictment. Chelsea finished 12th in the Premier League with 44 points, scoring 38 goals in 38 games and finishing 30 points worse off than last season.
To placate the fans still pining for Tuchel, Boehly and co. turned to Frank Lampard, a man who has already failed at being Chelsea manager. The absurdity of the situation was summed up when Lampard sat at a press conference in the Bernabeu and was unable to categorically deny he was recommended for the job by James Corden.
Lampard was a total flop. Chelsea were knocked out of the Champions League with a whimper and their closing run in the league was a horror show, collecting all of five points from nine games. For Lampard, this is a regrettable consistency. Across his last 38 games as a Premier League manager with Everton and Chelsea, he has picked up 34 points.
Lampard left by assuming the role piloted last year by Ralf Rangnick: the interim-manager-cum-pundit.
“The standards collectively have dropped. I can be honest about that now that it’s my last game, I might not see some of them that much anymore. If you’re not together in the dressing room, and you’re not vocal in the dressing room, driving each other and competitive because I want your place and you want mine. Any top team has to have that.”
As limited a manager as Lampard is proving to be, this iteration of the Chelsea job was an impossible task. This season might be the first in which the players lost the dressing room: Chelsea stockpiled so many of them that some had to get changed in the corridor.
Keeping an enormous squad of expensively-assembled international players happy and coherent is a difficult job, and it’s why Pep Guardiola prefers to work with a relatively slender squad. Guardiola says telling a hard-working player he will not play the next game “kills” him, how brutal it is to ask a player to move his family to a new country with an unfamiliar culture and language to play football only to then deny him the chance to play. That may be leavened with some typical Pep melodrama but there is an undeniable truth to it.
The incoming Mauricio Pochettino will demand a trimmed squad, but offloading players is a lot more difficult to do in practice than in theory, and the most likely to leave are academy stars like Mason Mount.
They also genuinely need to sign some more players, with a priority on a striker, a goalkeeper, and a central midfielder. They will have to do this without any European football, which has hit broadcasting income by about 25%.
There are other concerns, too, as the entire Boehly Era has been predicated on risk. Tying young players to eight-year contracts over which transfer fees are spread makes sense if that player is sold for a high price. For that to happen, they have to be a success at the club, and this season has shown that is not a guarantee.
The scale of this shambles raises another question: for how much longer will Boehly accept his role as the public face of all of these mistakes? Boehly is not exactly publicity-shy but he is not the only man in charge at Chelsea, he is co-owner along with Behdad Eghbali and so they both own this failure.
A season as bad as this is a stress test on any working relationship, and Liverpool fans who remember the George Gillett/Tom Hicks circus will attest to how badly things can go wrong when trust breaks down at the highest level.
Nothing currently suggests that anything like that will happen at Chelsea, but not all of the freshman-year bumbling can be written off. If Pochettino cannot turn things around, the next story told about Chelsea could be grisly.
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Chelsea column Frank Lampard Premier League