EPL TALK: No PR spin can save Chelsea from Lampard fiasco

IN THE 1990s, heavyweight boxers were often playfully touted as the man who beat the man who beat the man who beat Mike Tyson. Frank Lampard has gone one better at Chelsea. He’s beat the man who beat the man who beat Frank Lampard.

Super Frank is so super, he could only succeed himself, not so much the son of Jor-El as the son of an old West Ham United coach and the nephew of Harry Redknapp. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Nepo Baby, ready to save the day with his special powers of being a club legend.

Graham Potter was a dignified, experienced coach, successful across all levels of that dastardly fickle and myopic English football pyramid. At Brighton, he was granted time, patience, a sensible budget and pragmatic owners. He had none of those things at Stamford Bridge, just an employer who continues to come across like a strange, unkempt uncle at a wealthy gathering in the TV show Succession.

Chelsea owner Todd Boehly and his consortium of football Oompa Loompas have gone through £600 million, two managers and more players than a WAG party in a West London nightclub to finally realise that even Roman Abramovich understood that money didn’t mean anything if a) he didn’t maintain cordial relations with Vladmir Putin and b) he bought the odd No.9.

Under the oligarch era of reasonably ugly greed, the Blues never won an English Premier title without a conventional centre-forward leading the line. In the Boehly-Cirque du Soleil era, the Blues couldn’t win a school egg-and-spoon race without first spending half a billion on a load of kids with no hand and eye coordination.

Potter was probably out of his depth. But it’s exceedingly difficult to castigate a decent, methodical English coach for swapping the sedate Brighton coast for a maddening role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He made the best of a crazy situation. And even then, he probably would’ve guided Chelsea to a top-10 finish and the last eight of the Champions League, a decent return for an American investment opportunity formerly known as a football club.

But fear not, Super Frank is here now, the man behind Frank Lampard’s Derby County, Frank Lampard’s Chelsea and then Frank Lampard’s Everton. He won nothing at any of them, was sacked from the last two and only got the first one because Uncle Harry put in a phone call.

Lampard is an arguably less successful – and certainly less experienced – manager than Potter and has a marginally better Chelsea record, albeit one achieved in less troubled times. After 84 games in charge, Lampard left with a points per game record of 1.75. After his 31 games in charge, Potter ended up with a poor 1.42 points per game per record.

In coaching terms, Potter has the obvious edge, but Lampard is a club legend, which conjures an immediate, spontaneous standing ovation from the punters. Whether it can conjure a solution to Chelsea’s goal-scoring issues remains to be seen.

Little more than a club legend for hire

Cogs are already turning on the PR machine, with folks drawing parallels between Lampard and another club legend returning in an interim role at a similar time and inspiring an unlikely run to Champions League glory in 2012. But Roberto di Matteo inherited a smaller, less fractured squad and hadn’t already been sacked by the same club - just 26 months earlier - and then managed to get himself sacked at a second club in the meantime. It’s beyond parody.

But that hasn’t stopped Jamie Redknapp – Lampard’s cousin – from suggesting that Lampard’s unexpected appointment is a sly, sensible move, one that could stabilise the club and lead to a full-time role for Lampard. Sensibly, the modest manager wisely avoided such idealistic sentiment, telling reporters that he was “not getting ahead” of himself. He presumably wants to keep his options open, just in case Everton or Derby come calling in the summer.

Still, within hours of the appointment, football writers were foolishly writing about football – one can almost hear Boehly and his Ted Lasso devotees laughing at such a daft notion – as if any of this has anything to do with that round ball thingy.

Maybe Mason Mount can return to prominence under the manager who famously discovered him. Maybe Ben Chilwell will replace Potter favourite Marc Cucurella at left-back in a less-complicated 4-3-3. Maybe the entertaining goalkeeping merry-go-round can begin again with Edouard Mendy and Kepa Arrizabalaga, who Lampard viewed with a level of disdain usually reserved for an ingrown toenail.

It really doesn’t matter, does it? Chelsea are still a football club in the way that Twitter is a benign social media platform, as opposed to a play exercise among international billionaires looking to maximise revenue in an unfamiliar industry, for a lark, because they can.

Strip away the PR fluff concerning warm memories of di Matteo and underdogs prevailing in Europe and Lampard is exposed as little more than a club legend for hire, a stop-gap cheerleader for an unpopular regime, something to talk about as the billionaires do the best not to inadvertently burn down the house.

The homecoming hero, the line-ups, the formation, the final position in the league standings are morsels for the masses, handy distractions for new owners seeking to move the stadium down the road to Earl’s Court, according to reports, a proposal that remains unpopular with the hardcore support base. Super Frank is perhaps there to work a different kind of pitch.

In the end, Potter couldn’t buy a win, but Lampard buys goodwill. He buys time for the owners, a couple of months to work the phones, revise potential stadium plans and revenue streams. He’s a Band-Aid for something much bigger than something as trivial as a football team.

Lampard may not be the right man for the job, but he’s probably the right man for his owners’ job, a useful emollient for the fans and a supportive conduit for the boardroom.

There’s still little evidence to show that Lampard can successfully manage an elite football club. But as luck would have it, his owners don’t look like they can run one either.

Neil Humphreys is an award-winning football writer and a best-selling author, who has covered the English Premier League since 2000 and has written 26 books.

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