Chelsea: Frank Lampard learning the dangers of doing too well, too soon

Frank Lampard took Chelsea off to a strong start through the first few months of the season. This unreasonably changed the expectations on him.

New manager bounces are not limited to mid-season replacements who overhaul tactics or ooze motivation. Chelsea started their new manager bounce under Antonio Conte in mid-October. His bounce was a combination of tactics and motivation, but mainly tactics as opponents needed 13 weeks to figure out to deal with a three-man defence and wing-backs in the Premier League. Similarly, Chelsea had their new manager bounce with Maurizio Sarri in the summer, when ketchup returned to the canteen. If any of the glad tidings last into the season, it was never apparent. Certainly his training and tactics caused no dismay to the rest of the league.

Chelsea are now coming off of Frank Lampard’s new manager bounce. His was a combination of motivation and tactics, both internal and external.

The enthusiasm of so many youth players ascending to the first team of their childhood club spread to everyone in the squad. Lampard’s status within the club and the game provided a form of motivation few players will ever experience in a locker room. And his tactics and training systems are sufficiently different from the last three seasons at Stamford Bridge to capture the players’ motivation and attention. They have the opportunity to learn something new, and his training is much more mentally demanding.

For the first few months of the season, Lampard also had a bounce via the opponents. Since this is only his second year as a manager and his tactics are still evolving, and because the squad is so young and learning (often through error) so rapidly, they could only go into games against Chelsea with a framework of a plan. Lampard had not yet shown enough for them to pull something off the shelf.

But the last few games have set the tone for how opponents can shut down Chelsea. Just as how teams needed a few months to figure out how to use the space behind Antonio Conte’s wing-backs and then split the centrebacks, or how October of last season saw a proliferation of schemes to kneecap Jorginho and all the passes that went through him, West Ham, Everton and Bournemouth showed how a simple, compact 4-4-2 is enough to put Chelsea in a repetitive passing cycle.

Like Antonio Conte, Frank Lampard is now dealing with how his new manager bounce distorted expectations.

Conte’s 3-4-3-powered bounce last for a 13-game win streak, and even after Spurs ended the streak they still won six of the next eight. That was enough to win the Premier League.

But after Conte shattered expectations in his first season, no one around the club recalibrated the expectations for the second. The basic idea remained the same: you will do better in your second season than in the first. Since he won the league in his first season, he did not have many options open for a bigger prize. And with 2017 being one of Chelsea’s most wasteful in the transfer market, he no longer had a competitive advantage over the rest of the league. There was no more novelty. Everyone knew what those players in those tactics would do, and they could set out to neutralize them.

Chelsea’s strong start to this season has made it seem like their recent downturn is a permanent decline rather than a regression to the mean or a simple dip in performance.

Frank Lampard was supposed to finish the season in the top four. Finish the season, not be ensconced there in early December.

Look at the language now used to express concern and disappointment: “Chelsea risk losing their buffer for the top four.” People are calling for Lampard’s Plan B (or dumber) because of this, forgetting that a few months ago Chelsea were not expected to have a buffer for the top four. The expectation was that Chelsea would be fighting to sneak in over the course of 38 games, not poking away challengers by matchweek 16.

A few months ago, the only real ambition for the Champions League was to qualify for next season’s. Now Chelsea are through to the Round of 16. Even though they barely made it – barely exceeding expectations, that is – it’s now part of the expectation package for the remainder of this year and certainly next year.

Teams should always improve from one season to the next. Managers should constantly be advancing their players, and the club should bring in the necessary players to refresh and augment the squad.

The benchmark for assessing the team’s improvement cannot always be trophies and the table, though, at least not in a manager’s first season.

If the manager outpaces expectations in his first season, the club and the fans should reorient their expectations for the second. Success early in the tenure changes the trajectory of what is achievable in the second, especially with a manager who has a lot of novelty behind his success. Before demanding more in season two when there was already more than asked in season one, everyone should ask how does what was possible then stack up to what is possible now.

Lampard should be judged against the expectations set last summer, not those whipped up after a strong run through October. A top-four finish is still the primary goal. And since the word is “finish” and not “festive season,” concern at this point is permissible, but outrage is not.