The narrative seemed to write itself: Frank Lampard, having been offed by a famous Roman, resurrecting his managerial career at Easter. But the narrative was wrong. There has been no new manager bounce for Chelsea, quite the reverse. They have had a different manager for their past three games and they haven’t won any of them. This has been a new manager splat.
Sacking Graham Potter with quarter of the season remaining was presumably supposed to jolt Chelsea into life, to at least give them a puncher’s chance in the Champions League. That has not happened. Maybe at Stamford Bridge there will be an emotional surge, the once and future manager returning to save his club in their hour of need, but there was little of that in Wolverhampton.
There was a quick burst of “Super Frank” from the away fans, but it was soon doused by the reality of a game when Chelsea looked even less threatening than they had earlier this year.
At least under Potter, and Bruno Saltor, they were creating chances to miss. Chelsea here had one shot on target and rarely looked like adding to the 29 league goals they have scored this season. It is 99 years since they last scored as few after 30 games of a campaign.
Lampard stalked meaningfully around his technical area. There was a lot of pointing, much rolling up of sleeves. But by the end there was just the familiar sight of him standing with arms folded as another game went against him. He has taken one point from his past eight Premier League games as a manager and has lost six of his past nine league matches at Chelsea. Yet somehow he will lead the most expensively assembled squad in history into a Champions League quarter-final against Real Madrid on Wednesday.
It had been here that Lampard had enjoyed one of his better days in his first stint as Chelsea manager when Tammy Abraham scored a hat-trick in a 5-2 win, the other goals coming from Fikayo Tomori and Mason Mount. That Chelsea still looked worryingly open, the problem that ultimately undid Lampard, was largely ignored in the excitement around the performances of the academy products.
Given the hundreds of millions spent on young promise, integrating youth will be a key part of the brief for whoever gets the Chelsea job full-time. But Lampard’s immediate priority here was to get the team set up for Madrid, handily against a team led by a former Madrid manager in Julen Lopetegui (although given Madrid are managed by a former Chelsea manager in Carlo Ancelotti, it may be that’s of no more than symbolic value).
Perhaps there was some great bluff being worked out. Perhaps this was a sophisticated training exercise whose true impact won’t be apparent until the game in the Bernabéu. But this did not look a side about to unseat the European champions.
The most obvious change from the recent past was the return to a 4-3-3, almost as though Lampard felt the need to create a Lampard-like role for the player who most resembles him the present Chelsea squad, Conor Gallagher. The 23-year-old had become largely a substitute under Potter, a man to be brought on late, in the period of the game when Chelsea mysteriously but repeatedly decided to cede the initiative. For all his energy, this was not a successful interpretation of the Lampard role, his passing too often wayward. But then, the midfield as a whole didn’t work.
Against Wolves’s 4-4-2, the 4-3-3 should logically have given Chelsea a man advantage in the centre, but it never quite did. Rather, with João Felix and Raheem Sterling habitually bypassed, Wolves’ wide men habitually found space, which was what led, albeit thanks to a breathtaking finish, to Matheus Nunes’s opener. And that, frankly, is a worry: if your midfield is overrun by Nunes, Victor Gomes and Mario Lemina, you fear what might happen against Luka Modric, Eduardo Camavinga and Toni Kroos.
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What happens next is anybody’s guess. Maybe there will be a fairy story for Chelsea against Madrid – an oddly modern fairy story, admittedly, based on the romantic foundations of £900,000 a week for 19 years from an oligarch who would subsequently be sanctioned for his links to a dictator who had just invaded a neighbour, topped off by £600m in players purchases from a US private equity fund – but if there is not, what then?
Is it conceivable Lampard would be sacked before the end of the season? If No Potter came to be seen as better than Potter, can it follow that No Lampard is even better? And that’s the great joy of the Boehly reign at Chelsea. Nobody has a clue what the Great Disruptor might do next.
