Chelsea fans hold Frank Lampard to the same standards as Maurizio Sarri

Chelsea fans are thinking about more than the table and Frank Lampard’s accomplishments as a player when rating his first six months better than Maurizio Sarri’s.

Forget the cultists. They’ve been beyond salvaging since day one. But lately even some more level-headed Chelsea fans are sharing some variation of the idea that their fellow fans are applying a double standard or exhibiting bias by speaking more positively of Frank Lampard, who currently has the Blues in fourth place on 36 points after 21 games having lost four of the last nine, than Maurizio Sarri, whose Chelsea team were in fourth place with 44 points after dropping two of their previous nine at the same juncture last season.

Far be it from us to ever give any football fans, anywhere, any credit for any cognitive output, but we’re willing to say much more goes into their assessments than points on the table. Let’s take a look at a few of those factors.

A lot falls under the related aspects of man-management and club identity, so we’ll start with one area where the two overlap: player leadership. Maurizio Sarri ghosted the club captain. Their word, not mine. Even if you think Cahill was not worthy of being in the XI last season or was wholly unsuitable for Maurizio Sarri’s vision and style of play, how Sarri handled Cahill was appalling.

By contrast, Lampard used the hierarchy of the club captaincy as a way of integrating Jorginho – Sarri’s “son” (Cesc Fabregas’ word, not mine) – into the club and rehabilitating Jorginho’s image with the fans. Lampard took a step to make Jorginho less a Sarri player and more of a Chelsea player. And when confronted with a situation where a player, the manager and the club were not on the same page, Lampard took transparent, decisive action. David Luiz is now doing David Luiz things at Arsenal, instead of rotting passive-aggressively on the bench during game days and poisoning the squad on other days (something Cahill never did, mind you).

Youth players are the other major intersection of man-management and club identity.

Frank Lampard is under no obligation to play as many youth as he has. He has plenty of experience in the squad for nearly every position. Those older players may not be the most talented or the best suited to what he has in mind, but in terms of justifying his decisions and perhaps his employment, they are the safer options.

Lampard is playing the youth mainly from the recognition of their talent and the higher coachability of young players. But part of it may be that, for Lampard, they are the safer option. Using those players embeds him in the club as a manager (he said from the start he would not ride his own coattails from his playing days), and connects him to the future and the bigger project at hand.

Maurizio Sarri never used the youth at all, which meant he never tapped into any of those veins of sentiment, talent or purpose. Sarri did not see the youth as part of his future with the club, either because he did not rate them highly enough, he did not conceive of having a future with the club or he just could not see past the immediate situations he was in. He disconnected himself – or, at the very least, never took steps to connect himself – to the future of the club, which he never viewed as his club. There was no longer vision beyond the next match day under Maurizio Sarri, at least not one he ever shared.

That brings us to how to compare the football and the form between the two managers’ sides. Lampard’s Chelsea are as frustratingly inconsistent and Maurizio Sarri’s Chelsea were hypnotically consistent.

Fans accept Chelsea’s losses because they can point to the progress and efforts Lampard is  making. Lampard, in the last two weeks, has gone through more formations, starting lineups and substitutions (both players and the timing of the substitutions) than Sarri did all season.

The fluctuations, the changes, the responses show that Lampard recognizes the need to do something more and is willing to do that something more. Sometimes he does several something’s more in a game. Fans know that where the club is now is not where they will be at any time down the road, because they see change happening, even if progress is hardly linear.

Everybody in football knew exactly where Chelsea were going under Maurizio Sarri because they reached that endpoint in late September. There were no changes or evolution, so how could anyone expect anything different to come out of the team weeks, months or years down the road?

Even if you appreciated the results Sarri delivered last season, there was no trajectory. The team did not have a growth curve, they had a plateau. And in any aspect of life, maintaining a steady level means falling behind everyone else.

This is one major reason why I never had much and now officially have zero patience for anyone who says “Why can’t you just appreciate a good result?” Because the result only tells you what happened in the past. How the result came about tells you what will happen in the future. If you care to notice how things happen and accept that sometimes the how is at odds with the what, you’ll be a lot less surprised when the two come together in an unpleasant fashion in the future. And if you’re the person able to affect the outcome – like the manager – you can maybe make that future a bit better.

With Lampard, we can hate losing (I was in a quite foul mood for the remainder of Wednesday, and that was a mere draw) but still see how the loss puts pieces in place for future wins. And in the interest of true fairness, we can be happy with a win but acknowledge that the happiness may be fleeting. That was exactly what happened with the Arsenal game.

We need to get over the idea that bias is a bad thing. We’re talking about being fans. The whole thing is about bias. Lamenting someone’s “bias” is only a short step away from condemning someone for having an “agenda,” when in both cases we’re just talking about an opinion built upon some supportive structure.

Many Chelsea fans may be biased towards one manager or another, past or present. Sometimes it’s just a gut thing, and other times it’s explainable. When it’s explainable, as it is in any comparison between successive managers at the same club, the bias has a basis. In the case of Frank Lampard and Maurizio Sarri, everything one does, the other does the opposite (we didn’t even get into pedagogy and tactical methodology), which means we should expect strong divergent opinions.

Being a fan of Frank Lampard is a matter for both the heart and the head. Neither is right or wrong, but at least with the latter fans can make a strong case.