Everton have made a winless start to the Premier League season, but Frank Lampard has one triumph. There were 48 hours remaining in the transfer window when he declared victory in the battle for Anthony Gordon. Perhaps it was a rearguard action worthy of Jordan Pickford from the Everton manager: with fewer resources, he repelled Chelsea’s advances.
He had set a deadline, he said, for any move for Gordon, and it had passed. “It is too late,” he insisted. Lampard has forged a bond with Evertonians by identifying with their club. Chelsea’s greatest goalscorer, and perhaps their greatest player, has frustrated them and kept his prized asset. “He is our player,” he said, and “our”, for Lampard, now means Everton.
If a saga now has some finality, it comes with an unhappy ending for Chelsea. Gordon had seemed one of the stranger of their many targets. Thomas Tuchel may have seen something in Gordon that eluded others. And yet, on the night when he seemed to be facing defeat in a tug of war, the 21-year-old looked more like an ideal candidate for Chelsea than ever before.
Tuchel has improved many a player in his time at Stamford Bridge but he has struggled to make forwards prolific. And while, 200 miles further south, one forward he has bought, Raheem Sterling, has found a scoring touch, another he wanted to has gone from impotent to the best scoring sequence of his career. Gordon became clinical as he lingered in limbo. One-third of his career goals have come in the last four days.
Whether galvanised and motivated by the prospect of going to Stamford Bridge, showing a temperament to suggest he can flourish in the limelight or justifying Lampard’s prediction he could one day become worth £100m, Gordon has performed when the focus on him has never been greater. “The interest in him is because he is a top player,” said Lampard. “He is a special player.” At a febrile Elland Road, when he scored a goal and, with a better finish, would have set up another for Nathan Patterson, he looked a talisman.
The oddity about Chelsea’s interest was that they required a finisher and Gordon, with four goals in 78 previous appearances, showed few signs of being that. Yet two in the next two, at Brentford and Leeds, have been taken with the kind of calmness in front of goal he had rarely shown before. There were certain similarities to both strikes, each stemming from a well-timed dart in behind a defence. He had never found a method to get goals before, a way of turning his incessant, direct running into enough of a threat. That may be changing.
“He will get better and better,” said Lampard. “Adding goals is the next step and the hardest step. I said from the day I joined the club that I want more goals from him. He has everything: attitude, ability, speed and it was a great finish. You saw his worth to this club.”
If one reason for Lampard’s defiance was Gordon’s affiliation with the Everton fans, another was pragmatic. Gordon may have brought a windfall, but they would have had to spend it well, which would have been harder as time ran out. They lost Richarlison and Dominic Calvert-Lewin, for different reasons; even with Gordon, they only have three points and two have come courtesy of his goals. They can wonder and worry where they would be without him. “We are playing games at the minute without an out-and-out striker,” Lampard said. “We need that output from our wingers.”
Gordon has begun to offer the end product but the starting point was simply that he started. In the process, he proved the anti-Fofana. Two young players found themselves targeted by Chelsea. They reacted in different ways: the Leicester defender Wesley Fofana by opting out of games, the Everton winger by playing and scoring. Fofana, though, will get the move. Gordon’s loyalty and professionalism look admirable to most; to some, it may seem ill-advised. Certainly he showed he cared, even if impetuousness could have brought a red card when he came perilously close to a head butt.
Which, in a different scenario, could have meant starting his Chelsea career with a suspension. Instead, if Lampard is right, he has a Merseyside derby on Saturday. “I don’t have to worry about him any more,” he said.
When Gordon gave his shirt to Everton supporters after the draw with Nottingham Forest, it felt like a goodbye. When he did likewise at Leeds, it seemed something else. It was a rare Chelsea defeat Lampard could savour.
