Frank Lampard is not doing anything groundbreaking with Chelsea, he is simply doing absolutely everything absolutely right. That may not win anybody an award for tactical blogging, but it is the way for teams to win trophies.
Good football analysis, like good football, keeps the simple things simple and explains them simply. As I once adapted Williamson’s First Law to the Twitter-based Maurizio Sarri-philic commentariat, everything seems complicated when you don’t know a f**king thing about it.
Our Twitter pal Sebastien Chapuis’ simple but not simplistic football analysis is a psychological and, worse, social media #brand threat to those who have invested honest-to-God minutes on YouTube en route to building their follower base of even lazier, less sentient Chelsea (or Sarri) fans, the ones who haven’t logged the minutes and the clicks. In a typical exchange yesterday, someone with three times as many followers and 1/100 (generously) the understanding of Chapuis attempted to land a sick burn by noting the similarities between Chelsea’s preseason under Frank Lampard and Lampard’s time at Chelsea from 2009-13.
Well. Two things.
First, from 2009-13 Frank Lampard and Chelsea won two FA Cups, one Premier League, one Champions League and one Europa League. If there are any four consecutive years in any player’s, manager’s or player-turned-manager’s career to study and draw upon personal experience, those are them.
Second, the similarity is the point, the feature not the bug in Lampard’s program.
Neither Lampard nor his fans – including Chapuis, many of my colleagues here at The Pride of London, and me personally – are trying to sell what Lampard is doing as anything new. Lampard is not acting like his “system” requires a detailed set of players and many months to attain the first stage of mastery, only after which can the team (with those new players, of course) progress. There is no catchy term for what he’s doing. If Marcelo Bielsa hadn’t destroyed those surveillance files, doubtful anyone would be arsed to make clips with an EDM background on the TacticalFrankOholic YouTube page.
Frank Lampard is simply applying and building upon what he and his staff already know, and making it work for these players. He has the personal knowledge of 30 years in the game, access to decades of knowledge in his staff and experienced players, and man-centuries of accumulated knowledge in the history and study of football.
The humility of a card-carrying genius who has won every club trophy possible to an English Premier League player is not thinking he is reinventing the wheel. The genius is knowing that he doesn’t have to, because everyone that has come before him has bestowed a world of cars, trucks, trains, airplanes and autonomous vehicles.
Instead of puttering in his basement reinventing the wheel, he simply takes an Uber to the dealership to buy a Bentley. He can then drive his Bentley (or take another Uber) to work everyday to advance the game, perhaps marginally, but truly so. More importantly, as a practitioner and not a self-appointed chimp-anointed theoretician of the game, he will win trophies and titles, and develop a generation of players: the actual measures of a football manager.
Of course, the bonus in Chapuis’ timeline is a fan of Maurizio Sarri accusing anyone of cribbing their tactical playbook. Sarri did not so much reinvent the wheel as he bought an old bicycle, took the wheels off and sold them individually to idiots willing to pay three times the cost of a new bike for a used wheel.
Yet another reason he probably should have stayed a banker. Would have saved us all a lot of annoyance (and smoke inhalation).