The club are due to move to a new stadium but hopes of avoiding relegation rest on three games at their old fortressThe average English adult in the 1890s was about four inches shorter than today, and perhaps nowhere is this more evident that when trying to navigate one’s way around Goodison Park.The ceilings are low, the doorways and gangways narrow, the seating evidently designed with the more compact late-Victorian posterior in mind. Continue reading...
Chelsea’s new coach is facing a hostile reception since, unlike Frank Lampard, he is not steeped in the club’s sense of identityIt’s never just a club. It’s never just about the players and whether they can put the ball in the net more times than their opponents. Your football club is always something else. Perhaps it’s a repository for nostalgic memories of childhood or home. Perhaps it’s a symbol of defiance against the establishment. Perhaps, particularly for top clubs who have the luxury of thinking about more than mere survival, it represents a way of playing.That’s why some Manchester United fans get so worked up when it’s suggested they are a club without a consistent playing philosophy, even when pointing...
It’s easy to make the case he has been overpromoted at Chelsea – but a more interesting question is whether he has failedWhy do people want Frank Lampard to fail so much? This seems like a reasonable question at the end of a week tickled and teased by rumours that Lampard is about to be sacked at Chelsea, that “elements” within the dressing room are already jimmying away at his fixings – all wrapped up in a gleeful surge of postmortems, pile-ons, and a tangible hunger for the great Roman to whirl his terrible scythe.And yet he still stands! No doubt to the anguish of many watching from the sidelines. Because people really do want Lampard to fall short, and...
The financial structures of modern football mean steady progression is unworkable and few former players taking the reins of an elite club are likely to have had adequate preparationEverybody wants their own Pep Guardiola. That is the dream. You take a club legend just beginning his coaching career, stick him in charge of the reserves for a season, give him the top job, then watch as he revolutionises football with a squad based around academy products and wins three league titles and two Champions Leagues. It’s not just winning, but winning your way.That’s why so many major clubs have turned to former players with limited or no first-hand managerial experience: Juventus with Andrea Pirlo, Chelsea with Frank Lampard, Arsenal with...
The Chelsea manager is staying calm amid a slump but he must be proactive and not simply wait for hard work to pay offFrank Lampard’s autobiography is called Totally Frank. It was written in 2006 when the then Chelsea midfielder was 28, rendering it – at best – Partially Frank, Prematurely Frank, Avariciously Hasty Frank.Anyway, there is a passage in the book from the summer of 2005, when Lampard gets wind of a rumour that the winner of the club’s player of the year award gets invited on to Roman Abramovich’s yacht. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, Lampard tells himself. And so at one home game he musters the courage to ask the Chelsea owner if the rumour is true. Abramovich...