Wednesday’s Carabao Cup tie was Frank Lampard’s 15th game as a manager. His experience in dozens of games alongside Gary Cahill and against Cesc Fabregas helped him build a gameplan that nearly defeated Chelsea.
If Derby County earn promotion at the end of this season, Frank Lampard will spend 2019/20 crafting strategies against many players and coaches he encountered – and usually bested – as a player. He will only have been gone from the Premier League for four years, which means many familiar faces will be looking at him from the pitch and from the opposing technical area. In a mind like his, this will be a significant advantage as the Rams fight for survival.
Two pillars of Derby County’s midfield strategy against Chelsea were Gary Cahill and Cesc Fabregas. Derby used these two as their reference points to sever Chelsea’s front half from the back, impairing Chelsea’s ability to play the ball out and giving the Rams extra opportunities on offence.
Frank Lampard has deep personal knowledge of both players. Lampard played 94 games with Gary Cahill for Chelsea and England. Appearances for the Three Lions started and finished their time together: from a European Championship qualifier in 2011 through the 2014 World Cup.
Lampard and Cesc Fabregas never played together but they faced each other 21 times. Sixteen of their first 18 meetings came in London derbies, with Fabregas at the heart of Arsenal’s midfield (the other two were with the national teams). Lampard’s last two Chelsea games against Fabregas were the semifinals of the 2011/12 Champions League, after Fabregas had returned to Barcelona. Their final meeting, though, was the bizarro-world game where Lampard was in the wrong shade of blue and Fabregas was with Chelsea. Less said about that game, the better.
Lampard set up Derby County in a 4-5-1 against Maurizio Sarri’s standard 4-3-3. Derby’s midfield line functioned as a full five-man unit when out of possession for much of the game. They moved with the discipline and cohesion of a well-drilled defensive line.
Early in the game one of the midfielders would join the striker in covering and pressing Gary Cahill whenever Chelsea had the ball deep in their zone. The Rams left Willy Caballero unmarked and kept a cover shadow on Andreas Christensen, making a pass from Caballero to Cahill the best option to play out from the back. Once Cahill received the ball, his markers – sometimes joined by a third – would swarm in to force an errant pass. This nearly paid off within the first five minutes, and they did not need to wait much longer to score a goal off a defensive error.
Derby’s midfield line of four – five when not supporting the pressure on Cahill – took station between Chelsea’s two midfield units. They stayed between Cesc Fabregas – the deep-lying playmaker at the apex of a triangle with the centre-backs – and N’Golo Kante and Mateo Kovacic in more forward positions. Since Cahill’s best option to avoid giving the ball away was a safe pass to Fabregas, Derby waited for him to make this pass before running at Fabregas. Mason Mount, in particular, kept Fabregas in his crosshairs the entire game.
Once Fabregas had the ball, Mount ran ahead of the midfield line to pressure Fabregas into a pass. The rest of Derby’s midfielders, though, blocked the passing lanes from Fabregas to Chelsea’s other midfielders or full-backs.
Mount’s pressure made the safest option for Fabregas a pass back to the centre-backs, which started the process all over again. Otherwise, Fabregas had to loft a pass over Derby’s midfielders to find his own midfielders or wingers, who were sandwiched between Derby’s midfield and defensive lines.
As the first half went on, Derby eased their pressure on Cahill after seeing how it was enough – and required much less sprinting – simply to mark out Fabregas. The Blues responded around this time, too, by having the midfielders drop onto the Fabregas-side of Derby’s midfield line and bringing the wingers back towards the full-backs, much as they did against Burnley. This required Derby to keep their midfielders back to prevent Chelsea from bringing the ball and overloading players in against Derby’s defence.
It does not take a manager of Frank Lampard’s literal genius to know that forcing Gary Cahill to handle the ball or forcing Cesc Fabregas to pass quickly under pressure are effective ways of challenging Chelsea. However, it does take someone of Lampard’s unmatched knowledge and experience of midfield to develop and instill these tactics in a squad after only a few months. Just in this one game you could see the influences of the managers he has worked under, particularly Jose Mourinho. The speed and precision with which Derby’s midfielders drop back and recover their shape is what Mourinho drills into his defenders. Lampard translated those methods into a different line.
Lampard’s experience playing against Fabregas also enabled him to give detailed instructions to Mason Mount. Mount did the job that Lampard did for those 21 games, and Mount’s reading of Fabregas’ timing and the overall rhythm of the game suggests Lampard told him “This is what to do because this is what will work – because it has.”
Likewise, he knows what he would have to do to cover for Cahill or a defender like him. Lampard could instruct his midfielders to do the things he had to watch out for as a player, both in terms of pressuring Chelsea’s defence and cutting off the outlet to midfielders in his old position.
In the broad sense, Frank Lampard had been preparing for this match for years. Since Derby drew Chelsea a few weeks ago, he has probably put a little extra time every day into studying Chelsea’s tactics, just as he once spent extra time after training every day taking free kicks. His understanding preparation levels as a player are translating to his coaching career.
If Derby come up next season, his opponents will not be too happy to see him knowing what he knows about them.