For Frank Lampard and Chelsea, an Encore Without the Cheers
Chelsea’s fans have grown sufficiently accustomed to seeing managers come and go that, at times, they can harness Abramovich’s susceptibility to the slightest pressure to their own ends.
Maurizio Sarri, who preceded Lampard, was hardly an unmitigated success, but his only season at Stamford Bridge was no overwhelming failure: His team finished third in the Premier League and won the Europa League. And yet, months earlier, some fans had been agitating for his dismissal. They had never taken to him, never bought into his style of play, and they knew that, at Chelsea, it does not take much to tip the balance.
In that context, the fans’ desperation for Lampard can be read not just as hopeless sentimentality, but as a desire for some sort of constancy. For 18 years, Chelsea has staged an endless parade of managers: some young, some old, some exotic, some familiar. Each one has hinted at some new direction for the club. And yet none have stuck around for long.
The riposte to any criticism of that approach has always been to point at Chelsea’s bulging trophy cabinet, but that is no longer as convincing as it once was. The cycle of boom and bust, crest and fall, has left the fans with a feeling of seasickness, rootlessness, one to which both the club’s supporters and its hierarchy hoped Lampard would be the balm.
Lampard was, perhaps, the clearest example yet of soccer’s brief but ongoing belief that every club has within the ranks of its alumni some visionary who can do for them what Pep Guardiola did for Barcelona.
