Chelsea: Frank Lampard can learn from other young managers’ mistakes

Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Gareth Southgate, and other young managers started strong before fading. Frank Lampard can learn from their mistakes with Chelsea.

Being a manager is a delicate balancing act between what works and making adjustments to stay ahead. Thus far, Frank Lampard has been very good at raising the spirits of Chelsea while tweaking things here and there as he goes.

Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Gareth Southgate had similar starts in their respective tenures. Both came in and breathed new life into Manchester United and England but then things began to stagnate. The feel good factor started to fade as they either stuck to something too long or tried to adapt too much too soon.

Frank Lampard can learn from these two before similar issues begin to hound him. Managing the balancing act of stability and change is going to be a tough task at any club and Lampard can learn from the mistakes of others before he too falls into the same old trap.

Solskjaer’s example is the more extreme. When he came in after Jose Mourinho, all he had to do was put an arm around the players. The tactics became brutally efficient and simple but there was still a lot of Mourinho’s training hardwired into the players. Simply by giving them confidence again, they were able to succeed.

Solskjaer rode confidence alone for too long. His tactics, not unlike Lampard’s, rely on good decision making. The higher the confidence of players, the faster they will make decisions and they will generally make better ones. But one bad result turned into another and then another. Instead of reinforcing strongly to create competition, Solskjaer downsized the squad to the bare bones. And because it was left so thin, injuries and lowered confidence have dragged United deeper and deeper into the hole. Solskjaer stuck to the same old same old for too long and it is biting him now.

Southgate’s issues are slightly different. Mind, it would likely be hard to find many English fans upset with him, but there is a growing consensus that he is not the right man to take England forward. The 3-5-2 that England used successfully in the run up to the World Cup and the tournament proper has given way to the 4-2-3-1 that preceded it. Southgate is calling up new players, but the majority of his squad remains the players that did so well in Russia even if their current club form is woeful (see, any Spurs player).

The Czech Republic loss was coming at some point as England has grown increasingly stale in recent games. The English may have rode set pieces heavily at the World Cup but that at least looked like a side that knew what they were doing. But against the Czechs, things reached the breaking point as England struggled to string two passes together, let alone get anywhere close to the final third.

What was working had been left behind too soon for Southgate. 4-2-3-1 may be the way forward, but it may also be too far forward. The 3-5-2 was hardly broke, but Southgate decided he had to fix it all the same.

For the most part, Lampard has thus far avoided any similar issues. Players that have been doing poorly have either been rotated out or they have rebounded in short order. When a tactical set up was not working, Lampard worked his way into another one that was not too unfamiliar but solved the issues.

But there may come a time where Lampard has to decide whether to adapt or stick with what is working. Solskjaer played it too safe and Southgate played it too risky. Like Lampard, both started on the right track before upsetting the balancing act manager’s need to consider.

By all accounts, it appears as Lampard is the type to learn from all of that and keep the act where it needs to be. Fans will not turn on him because he is Lampard and the feel good factor is more tangible than it has been in years at Chelsea. There may come a day where Lampard needs some encouragement to make a change (or to stick with it) and on those days hopefully he shows he learned from the mistakes Solskjaer and Southgate already made.