You can't win anything with kids

It is, of course, too soon to make even an educated guess as to how the 2019-2020 football season will ultimately pan out for anyone, let alone Chelsea, whose competitive record since the season began currently stands at Played 6, Won 2, Drawn 3, Lost 1 with not a clean sheet between them. But at risk of putting an over-positive spin on things, such a capricious start to Frank Lampard's tenure as the club's head coach belies what will no doubt become the core narrative of the Blues' season to come: kids.

Now, the likes of Tammy Abraham, Mason Mount, Fikayo Tomori and Christian Pulisic, plus Reece James, Callum Hudson-Odoi and Ruben Loftus-Cheek, when they are released from injury, are hardly children, at ages ranging from 18 to 23. But in the recent history of Chelsea Football Club, that Abraham is currently the Premier League's top scorer, that Mason Mount has just made his senior England debut, and on Saturday Tomori scored an early contender for goal of the season, is testament to the undoubted sprinkling of youthful stardust that has transformed the mood around the club like stormy weather and overcast skies being replaced by bright sunshine and a cloud-free vista. The football is still capricious: Saturday's 5-2 win over Wolves is not without the recognition that Chelsea still couldn't keep a clean sheet, despite Abraham breaking Eden Hazard's record for becoming the youngest Chelsea player to score a league hat-trick as well as becoming the first English player to score three for Chelsea since Lampard himself eight years ago.

There are more milestones to come, more records to be broken. The 11 league goals scored so far between Abraham, Mount and Tomori, five games in, have already beaten the previous best record of academy graduates (six scored by just Loftus-Cheek in the entire 2018-19 season), marking a first since Roman Abramovich bought the club in 2003. That, alone, is a telling set of stats, even if they are a reflection of the situation the club finds itself in, unable to do the thing they've done most seasons under the Russian oligarch's ownership, and simply gone out and bought players. Thanks to the two-window FIFA transfer ban, the youngsters are getting match time that would have never been possible under any of Lampard's predecessors, a frustration that first found oxygen under José Mourinho, but manifested itself more prevalently under the progressively petulant reign of Antonio Conte, and more dangerously, under the stubborn Maurizio Sarri, whose eventual inclusion of Hudson-Odoi and Loftus-Cheek came across as something he was coerced into.

We have been there before, of course. The promise of youngsters like Jon Harley, Ryan Bertrand, Josh McEachran and Nathan Aké, joining Chelsea Academy alumni like Venables, Greaves, Bonetti, Osgood, Harris and, latterly, Terry, in breaking through into the senior squad and on to greatness is a well-wrought saga. To date, only John Terry in the club's modern era has gone on to see out his career at the club he joined as a schoolboy. That, though, is the romantic view of youth. Football is a serious business, not a careers advisory service, so the expectation of Academy products breaking into the senior team has been somewhat naive in the era of mega-money transfers for players from the European and South American elites. Even when the Chelsea youth squads train in a separate part of the club's Cobham training ground as the senior team, it has often sounded like they could be in a separate part of the country, for all the good it's offered (some weeks back the Daily Telegraph reported that Sarri didn't watch a single youth training session or attend any under-23 games during his year in charge, and once remained in his Cobham office while a critical youth championship game was going on barely 50 yards away).

Lampard's appointment as head coach in July may have appeared like a compromise, in the absence/reluctance of more experienced candidates for the job, but his open embrace of youth, which has already seen Academy players taking part in senior squad training sessions, is bringing a degree of feelgood back to the club. Even if defence continues to be a major worry, the goals-per-game from Abraham in particular is a genuine cause for celebration, even if the reality is that Chelsea this season are not expected to end it that high up the Premier League table, or progress in the Champions League, a campaign which commences tomorrow night against Valencia. But there is an acceptance - for now - that this will be a fallow year that, unless things go dramatically badly, will have us see homegrown talent putting smiles on faces at Stamford Bridge, something that was absent for much of last season and patches of the previous one.

Even more pleasing is that in these first few weeks youngsters have been going some way to entertainingly disprove Alan Hansen's infamous remark on Match Of The Day that "you can't win anything with kids" after Sir Alex Ferguson's then-young Manchester United side lost 3-1 to Aston Villa on the opening day of the 1995-96 season. United later went on to do the League and Cup double with that very same team, one whose average age was 26 years and 137 days. Curiously, only Chelsea has since won the league title with a younger squad - a side in 2005 featuring Lampard himself, Terry and Joe Cole with an average age of 25 years and 312 days. Perhaps you can win things with kids. Time, this season at Chelsea, will only tell.