Defeat at in last season’s corresponding fixture between Everton and Chelsea plunged Frank Lampard on the downward spiral that ultimately cost him his job but now he needs another home win at Goodison Park to help secure survival in his new role. Everton last hosted Chelsea on December 12, 2020 and in the first game in front of fans since coronavirus restrictions began, 2,000 Blues supporters made their voices heard as they cheered their side on to a hard-fought 1-0 victory.
It was the second time in as many years that Lampard’s Chelsea had been turned over at Goodison having suffered a 3-1 reversal in Duncan Ferguson’s first game in charge as caretaker manager the previous season but this time the loss would be far more damaging for the now Blues boss. It was the first of five defeats in eight matches that would result in his sacking on January 25, 2021.
While his replacement Thomas Tuchel subsequently delivered Chelsea’s second Champions League title at the end of the same season, Football.London’s Chief Chelsea correspondent Adam Newson explains the decision to axe Lampard caused plenty of uproar at the time. He told the ECHO: “Chelsea went into last season’s match against Everton at Goodison Park on the back of a 17-game unbeaten run in all competitions and top of the Premier League table. They just didn’t perform well that night and Everton outfought them and were far more intense in their game.
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“It all unravelled in the space of six weeks and when things start to go wrong for head coaches at Chelsea, it does tend to spiral very quickly. Maybe he didn’t have the managerial experience at that point to take hold of the situation.
“There have been a couple of instances since when Thomas Tuchel has maybe suffered a couple of defeats in a row and you’re wondering ‘where do we go from here’ but Tuchel has been able to stop it with a bang, no more. Lampard just wasn’t able to do that and unfortunately he ended up being sacked.
“That was a huge decision on the club’s part and interesting it was something that Tuchel himself questioned when he was contacted by Chelsea and he asked the club ‘are you sure you really want to do this?’ as he’d watched the team and thought they’d been a bit unfortunate. It was a hugely unpopular decision because of what Lampard meant and what everybody thought was still being built at the time but in retrospect it’s now impossible to argue that it wasn’t the right call because Tuchel is a vastly superior coach.
“That’s not trying to be harsh on Lampard, it’s the reality of Tuchel doing this job for 20 years now and Lampard for three or four. At the time it left a lot of supporters questioning what kind of relationship they were going to have with the club going forward though after dispensing with a club icon after six bad weeks.”
Lampard had been appointed by Chelsea in the summer of 2019, becoming their first English manager since Glenn Hoddle left in 1996 and while he had a somewhat different profile than many of his more recent predecessors, at first his arrival was greeted by many. Newson said: “I don’t think he’d have been appointed Chelsea boss at any other time with so little managerial experience. I think it was the perfect storm in terms of the factors that led to him coming in.
“That summer was always going incredibly difficult for Chelsea, not just in terms of the transfer embargo but Eden Hazard left as well. I imagine it wasn’t the most-appealing job for top European coaches and Lampard himself was pretty open in admitting that it wasn’t normal for Chelsea to appoint a head coach off the back of a season in the Championship with Derby County.
“He knew the realities of the situation but it was a move that unified what had been a very split fanbase under Maurizio Sarri, there had been a lot of negativity during the previous season despite the fact that he’d won the Europa League. There’d almost become something of a disconnect with many of the supporters and bringing in Frank Lampard was a smart PR move because it got 95% of the fanbase onside with the project.
“Lampard took the decision to focus on youth and that’s an element of his Chelsea tenure that some people overlook. They just see the situation as ‘oh they had the transfer embargo so he had to pick the young players’ but that wasn’t the case.
“He opted to get rid of David Luiz and give Fikayo Tomori his chance. He had Olivier Giroud there who was a perfectly capable Premier League number nine but chose to go with Tammy Abraham and he had Willian and Pedro but opted to play Mason Mount, they were conscious decisions along the way that he made to give these younger guys an opportunity.
“It was the smart appointment that Chelsea needed at the time to refresh in a manner that was appealing to most people because the fans were never going to turn on Lampard unless things got really bad.”
While expectations were checked in Lampard’s first season, a major spending spree ahead of his second campaign in charge upped the stakes and Newson believes that’s where his managerial inexperience started to show. He said: “The first season was good in that they finished fourth and got to the FA Cup final but while there was disappointment that Chelsea lost the game it was a strange finish because of the pandemic. There was a lot optimism going into that second season and Chelsea spent a lot of money and while it sounds counter-intuitive, I think that’s where the problems started to begin.
“In the first season, Lampard wasn’t able to sign players and had to work with what he’d got but then they’d spent £70million on Kai Havertz and £50million on Timo Werner and you had to try and get all these guys work and that’s probably where it got a bit jumbled for him. He was having to leave big personalities out which wasn’t that easy and handle things behind the scenes as well.
“There wasn’t much pressure in that first season but in the second season it flipped. It had gone from no new signings and a rebuild going on to ‘we’ve spent over £200million here, you have to step up and make that challenge’ so maybe that’s where the shortcomings of someone who had only been doing the job for two years became far more apparent.”
Although Lampard the manager did not last long at Stamford Bridge, he’s far from alone in that category and still oversaw more matches than Avram Grant, Luiz Felipe Scolari, Andre Villas-Boas, Roberto Di Matteo and the aforementioned Sarri who he replaced. His legacy as a player at Chelsea, scoring 211 times in 648 games between 2001-14 also ensures that he remains a popular figure among the Stamford Bridge faithful who wish him well on Merseyside.
Newson said: “I think many of Chelsea fans consider Frank Lampard to be the club’s greatest-ever player. He’s the club’s all-time leading goalscorer, won pretty much everything he could win with them bar the Club World Cup and was such an instrumental player during the formative years of Chelsea as a ‘super club.’ He was the kind of player whose reputation was never going to be impacted by anything that happened as a coach and his name is still sung fairly often at home games with the ‘Super Frank’ chant going around Stamford Bridge.
“Most of the Chelsea fanbase still support him and appreciate his efforts in the role he played in helping Chelsea become what they are now. There are a lot of Chelsea fans who want him to do well because of that strong feeling towards him and the relationship with Frank.
“I’ve heard that there a lot of Chelsea fans keeping a closer eye on Everton results now than previously and want to see him succeed as a coach. There were obviously a lot of negative headlines at the end of his reign as Chelsea boss but he did a lot of good in many ways at the club.”
He added: “There was part of me that was surprised that he took the Everton job because we’d heard he was waiting for the right club and the right moment. Perhaps a stable club for him to go into and really make his mark without a lot of upheaval to deal with.
“As an outsider looking in at Everton, they’ve looked like anything but that in recent years. So I was surprised he took that gamble because I thought if this goes wrong for him, where does he go from here? If Everton get relegated, I don’t really know where his reputation is.
“Yes, Everton have been a difficult club to manage over the past few seasons but they were not in the relegation zone when he took over and had games that you’d expect them to win which they didn’t. The return of Dominic Calvert-Lewin was also supposed to be a big moment but it hasn’t really come off and it’s a tricky situation he finds himself in.
“I’ve never thought that Lampard the manager is anywhere near as bad as so people make out and neither is he as brilliant as others have portrayed, he’s a guy who is still very much learning his craft as a coach. If he was to leave Everton for whatever reason in the summer whether they suffer relegation or not, I’m not sure what job he then takes.”
