Frank Lampard is pushing hard to return to the Premier League as the manager of Coventry City.
Having missed out twice in the play-offs, including last season after lifting the Sky Blues into the top six, it's obvious that going up as league winners is the preference.
Lampard's previous play-off defeat came in the final in 2019, when he was in his first managerial role at Derby County. It was a job that came with challenges built in, but it didn't go unnoticed that a rookie manager was given a start near the top of the pyramid.
Frank Lampard on taking the opportunities offered to him
"People sometimes say to me, ‘Oh, you should have gone to manage the youth team or managed down at the bottom.’ But I’m like, ‘Why?’ I had a really long playing career where I learned a lot," Lampard explains to FourFourTwo.
"Of course you have to retrain as a manager and the job has much more responsibility in loads of ways, but I’d played for a long time and I wanted to take that opportunity with Derby."
"We made it to the play-off final and were so close to getting to the Premier League. I learned a lot of things during that first year in terms of management – managing staff, managing what the job entails.
"That was a great experience and unfortunate in the end. Then the Chelsea job came along."
Lampard played for the Blues for 13 seasons, scoring 147 Premier League goals and winning everything there is to win. There are some calls you just don't ignore, no matter the public reaction.
“The stars aligned with Chelsea,” says Lampard. “People had opinions, of course, but the opportunity was there, they had the transfer ban and everything.
"I wouldn’t have got the job without that, I knew that, but I went there, worked with the younger players, and we made it into the Champions League and got to an FA Cup final as well."
The England international, who was a Premier League and Champions League winner with Chelsea and is ranked at no.3 in FourFourTwo's list of the best English midfielders ever, is no more static as a manager than he was as a player.
He talks a lot about learning the job, about understanding that a manager never knows too much to adapt, and it's evident that he takes pride in his professional ability to do so.
There were questions when Doug King hired Lampard as Mark Robins' successor at Coventry. Gradually, he's revealing himself to be an agile, pragmatic manager shunning ideology in favour of winning matches whatever it takes.
