When Frank Lampard stands in front of the home dugout at Goodison Park for the first time as Everton manager on Saturday afternoon he is unlikely to spend too much time thinking about the two previous occasions he found himself trying to affect a game from that touchline.
But even now those meek defeats offer a precise portrait of where it went wrong for him at Chelsea and, more importantly, what needs to change this time around if he is to turn around a club flirting with disaster and prove his worth as a manager.
Criticising his players for “ridiculous” goals conceded in December 2019 after a performance in which they were grossly unprepared to handle the physicality of a team revved up by Duncan Ferguson and referring to a “work in progress” 12 months later in what turned out to be the start of his demise, and the same squad’s rapid rise to champions of Europe, only solidify the conceptions around his flaws.
