Dreams can come true - it’s just that this one is a fever dream

I have only once seen Real Madrid play in the flesh, and that was when a business associate took me to the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium some years ago for a home fixture against Getafe. It was a new football experience for me: kick-off at 9pm on a Sunday evening followed - as is the local custom - by dinner in a highly agreeable meal nearby (which meant not getting back to my hotel until almost 1am - perfect, then, for a critical meeting at 8am later that morning...). The football was average, but the atmosphere inside that awe-inspiring colosseum was electric.

Contrast that, then, with the atmosphere at Stamford Bridge around 5pm last Saturday, and what that means for mood around the ground tonight as Chelsea face Real in the second leg of their Champions League quarter final. Somehow, I don’t expect my second experience of seeing the serial European champions for a second time will match my first.

In fact, tonight promises to be a somewhat surreal episode in the fever dream that Chelsea’s season has been from the off. No one, not even the most rosy-cheeked optimist, is giving Frank Lampard’s team a hope in Hell of overturning Madrid’s 2-0 advantage from last week’s first leg. And with tickets at over £70 a pop, I’m even struggling to justify the “but it’s Real Madrid…” reasoning for seeing los blancos in the flesh against Chelsea in their current state. However, a lifelong fan does what a lifelong fan does.

Even by this season’s depths, Saturday’s defeat to an in-form Brighton at Stamford Bridge was a new low, and compounded by being Lampard’s first game in charge in front of the fans he played so brilliantly for over 13 years. The trouble is, on the evidence he’s presented over three games as interim manager, his appointment was purely a PR move by Todd Boehly and his co-owners. And even that looked like it had backfired when the American was seen remonstrating with fans in the tier above his executive box on Saturday.

Yesterday it emerged that an apparently excised Boehly followed his impromptu fan chat by marching from the West Stand across the vacated pitch to the home dressing room in the East Stand, telling the players that the club’s season has been “embarrassing”, and that the board expected better of a squad that has been added to with a £600 million spend during the two transfer windows that the Boehly-Clearlake Capital consortium has been in charge. Rumour has it that one particular player - thought to be Raheem Sterling - was made to feel particularly uncomfortable, given the princely sum that lured him from Manchester City last summer, for limited return since. However, to single out one player would be grossly unfair, given how awful almost all 16 members of the squad involved in Saturday’s game performed.

No doubt Boehly was trying his best to motivate the squad ahead of tonight’s game, with the Champions League now Chelsea’s only prospect for silverware this season, not to mention the only route back into Europe next term. It was reported that Boehly and his fellow board members, Behdad Eghbali and Hansjörg Wyss, spent about an hour in the dressing room, with one eye witness describing the scene as “weird”.

Goalkeeper Kepa Arrizabalaga, appointed Chelsea’s umpteenth captain of the season for the day on Saturday, downplayed the Boehly intervention, saying that it was “normal” for the American to visit the players after games. Lampard himself continued to apply his exemplary political skills during his pre-match press conference yesterday. “When an owner is invested in the team and wants to help and improve, it’s their prerogative to have the input they want,” adding that “past owners” - by which he clearly meant Roman Abramovich - weren’t always present in the dressing room. When the Russian did, it was either to celebrate a trophy, or to be a harbinger of doom for the current manager. “[Owners in the dressing room] is not a bad thing in terms of the identity of the club and where you want to get to,” he told journalists. “There is no problem with it. I had my things to say after the game. If the owner comes in and wants to be positive and speak to the players, then I think it is his part to do that.”

Much of the fanbase, however, pins the blame on Boehly for the mess Chelsea are in, with the £4.25 billion takeover - which did save the club after Abramovich had been forced to sell up - followed by the eye-watering outlay that brought in a phalanx of new players like Sterling, Enzo Fernandez, Mykhailo Mudryk and the loanee João Félix. In of themselves, exciting players, but injected into a squad with seemingly no plan or strategy for playing them. Thus, Graham Potter found to his cost that he was unable to get the best out of his expensive new charges, while still being saddled with wantaway deadweights like Hakim Zyech and Christian Pulisic (whom, inexplicably, he both continued to play). Lampard has now inherited the problem. Not only that but, in his own words, players he considers unfit, with some appearing unable (or unprepared) to carry out basic running at opponents.

All, then, is not happy in the Chelsea camp. Some fans will sympathise with Lampard, even if they’re not entirely convinced he's going to be able to restore any dignity to the remainder of the men’s team’s season (compare that with Emma Hayes’ Chelsea Women, who on Sunday booked themselves a place in their third consecutive FA Cup Final). However, Lampard does not have unanimous support: it is understood that in Boehly’s heated exchange on Saturday, sharp comments were made to him about Lampard’s interim appointment. You might think that to be an act of heresy, but such is the sulphurous mood at the club, that the side was booed off after the Brighton match, despite being the homecoming of “Super Frank”.

“With regard to the ownership and fans, passion goes both ways,” Lampard said yesterday. “The fans show passion and I don’t think the owners or anybody who comes to Chelsea can expect anything else. We have been fortunate enough that the club has been successful over the last 20 years or so. That means you want more of it.” Ever the diplomat, he continued: “The word passion is coming from both sides. These are passionate owners who want to bring a real vision to the club and we are probably the early stage of the process in those terms. We can all be passionate together and work in the same direction.”

The trouble is, there’s scant evidence of that on the pitch. Indeed, an impromptu team meeting led by Arrizabalaga in front of his own defensive area mid-game suggested that the players were starting to make it up for themselves. Lampard, you’d have hoped, should have been able to get this group of misfits playing for the shirt he graced as part of a team of serial winners. On Saturday, only Conor Gallagher and, to some extent, Mudryk, demonstrated any passion. Others, including the dependable wingbacks Reece James and Ben Chilwell looked off their game, possibly embarrassed by what and whom they were working amongst. 

There were too many other lows on Saturday to list here, though the ignominy of Sterling getting booed off stands out. Imagine that, happening to an English player and one of national distinction. But given that Sterling has apparently cut an isolated figure around the training ground, and is believed to have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the club (despite it paying him north of £300,000 a week), it could be said that he has become indicative of the toxicity at Chelsea, as they spiral deeper into the lower half of the Premier League.

Meanwhile, the process to appoint a permanent manager continues. Luis Enrique has already been interviewed, Mauricio Pochettino and relatively unknown Portuguese coach Ruben Amorim also remain under consideration, with Julian Nagelsmann looking increasingly the favourite (with members of the Chelsea board reportedly warming to him having initially been indifferent). However, the challenge for whoever gets the gig is that, on current evidence, Chelsea look unmanageable. To confound things further, Financial Fair Play considerations could leave the successful candidate with a squad drastically depleted by an end-of-season fire sale. Barely a day goes by without another name being added to the list of assets to be stripped. While the eBay catalogue of players many fans would readily eject writes itself (Zyech, Pulisic, Chalobah, Loftus-Cheek, Cucurella, Koulibaly and Sterling, at least), others might be more painful to part company with, most notably Academy graduates Mason Mount, Conor Gallagher and the highly rated young defender Levi Colwill, who could all leverage decent returns. Plus, to add to the new manager’s headaches, Romalu Lukaku will return to his parent club after Inter Milan signalled that they would not be renewing his loan deal, meaning a tricky ego will need reintegrating into a fractured side, despite being one criminally bereft of a nailed-on striker.

Even before the Boehly-Clearlake consortium arrived on the scene, Chelsea suffered from a bloated squad, only lightly offset by myriad loan placements. With a squad of 32 players today, including those acquired over the summer and January windows, Potter and now Lampard have had a near-impossible task keeping everyone happy. There have even been reports of not enough space in the changing room for everyone. More seriously, a working group that big presents challenges for the coaching staff at Cobham, let alone what Lampard must have to do to pick his best 11. On top of that, the new ownership brought with it a number of behind the scenes changes to technical and medical staff, which may have been reflected by some signs of player dissatisfaction spilling into matchdays.

‘Chelsea Twitter’ has been an unpleasant place for most of this season, where even the anonymous keyboard warriors - who’ve probably never set foot in SW6 - have whipped up dissent towards even favourite sons like Mount and Chilwell. The #PotterOut fraternity remained largely online until the crowd became noticeably more muted at Stamford Bridge itself, before becoming openly hostile towards the manager. By the time he was fired last month, Potter had largely lost the broad support, which forced the Chelsea board to act. But, by Saturday evening, after Chelsea’s third defeat in a row under Lampard, even the unthinkable of arguably the club’s greatest midfielder getting stick, was audible. 

The conclusion, then, is that Season 22-23 is lost. Lampard’s totemic figure notwithstanding, Potter could have been replaced by a house brick for the remaining games this term, and the dysfunction would probably be just as bad. Whoever gets to pick up the mess for next season will have a mountain to climb. He will have to rebuild a fractured squad, ensuring that some of the pricier additions who survive the summer cull are in the right frame of mind to compete for just the Premier League, the FA Cup and the League Cup. 

As many a wag has commented, there’s not a manager in the world who can come in and rescue this season for Chelsea. It remains to be seen whether Nagelsmann, Enrique or any of the others on the shortlist can quickly restore Chelsea to the European elite that, under Abramovich, London’s serial under-achievers became a part of. 

Perhaps, though, a fallow season or two is just what the club needs. That’s unless there’s an exceedingly unlikely miracle tonight in West London. Followed by another next month. And another, in Istanbul in June.

Just when you think you've figured football out...

“Football,” Danny Baker first observed back in the 1990s, “is chaos”. It's a theme he regularly returns to in his frequent rants on Twitter, usually of an evening while a so-called ‘elite’ fixture is taking place on television. The thinking is that the vast array of punditry deployed by the media suggests that there is something ‘scientific’ about the beautiful game, other worldly and therefore self-considered to be beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. This, Baker contests, is bogus.

I raise this largely as a result of the chaos at Chelsea this season. Graham Potter, who replaced the fired Thomas Tuchel, who replaced the fired Frank Lampard, has just been replaced on an interim basis by...Frank Lampard. “It is totally in keeping with the current chaos [that word again] at Chelsea under co-controlling owners Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali and the Clearlake group,” the BBC’s chief football writer Phil McNulty wrote on the corporation’s website, highlighting how, since the takeover last summer, the new owners had pumped in £600 million to buy new players, sacked Tuchel and then Potter after just 31 games in charge. “But the return of Lampard might just be the most eyebrow-raising development of the lot,” he added.

We like to think there’s logic going on at our football clubs. We expect it to be an exact science because coaching and training is governed by xG statistics and computer modelling. Clubs employ technical directors and sporting directors (I still don’t quite know the difference) on top of ‘head coaches’ (never, these days, simply “manager”) amongst the phalanx of specialists keeping the complex Formula 1 car that is a top football team on the track. Everything is therefore planned, programmed and finely tuned to the nth degree. It’s not. Because then you send your team out, and Kai Havertz is selected to lead the line.

On Tuesday night, Chelsea’s first interim coach of the week, Bruno Saltor (who’d never before picked a team at this level) put out more or less the same side that had lost so egregiously to Aston Villa three evenings previously, leading to Potter’s dismissal. Against Liverpool, it was largely painting by numbers to the untrained eye, and probably to more informed observers, too. It was also an abject reminder of just how both Chelsea and their opponents on the night have fallen this season. “Mid-table mediocrity,” one match report concluded. “Two bald men fighting over a comb,” was my erudite contribution.

Unbeknownst to most of us at Stamford Bridge until newspapers ran the picture you see at the top of this post, Lampard was observing from an executive box, the guest of Laurence Stewart and Paul Winstanley, Chelsea’s two sporting directors. This quickly turned into the suggestion that the 44-year-old could be on his way back, though in what capacity wasn’t known. At the same time, the former Spain coach Luis Enrique was said to have flown in to London for talks with the club about the vacant manager’s position, while the newly available former Bayern Munich boss Julian Nagelsmann was also under consideration, along with a fairly predictable list of runners and riders drawn from the European leagues.

At some point on Wednesday it emerged that Lampard was being considered as an interim solution, a stopgap to the end of the season, enabling the club to take until then to consider candidates for the full-time job with, perhaps, more care than that they applied after Tuchel’s abrupt exit. With a two-leg Champions League quarter-final against Real Madrid (under Lampard’s old boss Carlo Ancelotti) to play, starting next week, and some pride to be restored in the Premier League, putting Chelsea’s record goalscorer back in charge would at least be good PR. By Wednesday evening, the Lampard banner, unfurled in the Matthew Harding Lower section before kickoffs during his previous spell, was being retrieved from the back of whichever cupboard it had been stashed away in when its subject was fired - apparently with deep regret - by Roman Abramovich in January 2021.

“It’s a pretty easy decision for me,” said Lampard 26 months later, at a press conference yesterday. “This is my club. I have a lot of emotions and feelings. I’ve come with a belief I can come and help the cause until the end of the season. I’ll give my utmost to give the fans what they want until the end of the season. There’s a lot of talent in the squad. I’m excited to work with that talent and to help them.”

We shall see. The unavoidable elephant in the room here is that Lampard was sacked by Ambramovich on the back of Chelsea taking a southerly trajectory in the Premier League, followed by his dismissal two years later from Everton, with the Merseysiders in even greater peril, recording nine defeats in 12 league games to leave them in relegation territory. In both situations, there were mitigations. But even for this lifelong Chelsea fan, all romanticism aside, you hope this latest temporary arrangement doesn’t end in tears, for a second time.

Appointing club legends as managers is fraught with peril. It’s why I hope that Gianfranco Zola never comes back to Chelsea as head coach. He is rightly held in such high regard, you’d hate that to be jeopardised. Lampard’s first spell in charge carried the same risk, which eventually came to fruition. You can only hope that, in this limited new arrangement, he knows what he’s taking on.

“Of course, it was a surprise in terms of you never know a decision the club will make,” he said yesterday when asked about coming back. “There’s been lots of change in the Premier League this year. I’ve been particularly enjoying my period at home - it’s one of those where you can really throw yourself into your family, your wife and children, things you tend to put to one side when you’re working.” He stressed that Winstanley and Stewart put forward a specific proposition: “It wasn’t simple, because you have to take a lot into account in your heart and your heart,” Lampard explained, adding, knowingly, ”but this is Chelsea”.

So what is the task at hand? After taking Chelsea to Molineux on Saturday for a Premier League fixture with Wolves, they fly to the Spanish capital for that first leg with Real Madrid, a team which ruthlessly buried Barcelona 4-1 in their Copa del Rey ‘El Clásico’ on Wednesday evening. In any other season, an encounter with Madrid would be what the modern era Chelsea does well. But in this season, Lampard’s task - getting a bloated, lop-sided squad of over-priced players to gel in a way they haven’t hitherto - seems impossible.

There is, though, some precedent. In March 2012 Roberto Di Matteo replaced the failed experiment that was André Villas-Boas, immediately improving form to deliver credible wins in the Premier League and, more significantly, progress in the Champions League, beating Barcelona in a semi-final to take on - and beat - Bayern Munich in the final. “Roberto did an incredible job to stay on,” Lampard ruminated yesterday, but in typically diffident footballer style, measured that by adding “but that’s a different time in the club’s history. What is important to me is to park it to one side and get on the job.”

Lampard has always stood out as an intelligent, personable bloke. As a player, he was always regarded as a studious one, not least because his West Ham coach father Frank Sr drilled footballing discipline into him with hothousing vigour. The same concerns Chelsea fans had when he was originally appointed as manager of the club he spent 13 years at as a player will creep back this time, but if nothing else, this unexpected coda to his two-and-a-half-spell as head coach is a masterstroke of fanbase appeasement.

Picture: Chelsea FC

“We are delighted to welcome Frank back to Stamford Bridge,” said co-controlling owners Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali in a statement. “Frank is a Premier League Hall of Famer and a legend at this club,” it continued by way of explaining the thinking behind the appointment. “As we continue our thorough and exhaustive process for a permanent head coach, we want to provide the club and our fans with a clear and stable plan for the remainder of the season. We want to give ourselves every chance of success and Frank has all of the characteristics and qualities we need to drive us to the finish line.”

Perhaps, then, it is another experiment. Lampard won’t necessarily provide continuity, but may at least ease the sulphurous atmosphere that engulfed Stamford Bridge as Graham Potter’s hapless reign faltered ever further. In his press conference he made clear his deep and undeniable knowledge of the club, the staff at the Cobham training ground and, most importantly, many of the current players. For those acquired since his departure, they will be fully aware of Lampard’s high esteem at the club they’ve joined as well as his standing within the game at large. That alone might pay dividends, given that Chelsea’s expensively assembled squad has at times recently looked like a group of talented individuals without any semblance of unity.

Stamford Bridge, specifically, has long been trolled by visiting fans for a perceived lack of energy amongst the support. “Is this a library?” they bate us with. That has certainly been the case of late. On social media alone, Lampard’s return has certainly put smiles back on faces but if he doesn’t get a grip on team cohesion and confidence, and instil tactical thinking that seemed to desert him at Everton, those smiles might soon disappear. Chelsea’s season has already been written off, barring unlikely progression in the Champions League, but as the latest of Chelsea’s many interim managers - Di Matteo, Hiddink, Benitez et al - Lampard has history to live up to. No pressure, then.

When will they ever learn?

Well, we can't say we weren't warned. Frank Lampard's sacking has been on the cards, even before the mid-season slump. Some rumours suggest that the club was unhappy with things at the end of last season, Lampard's first in charge, and one which began with a transfer ban, the loss of Eden Hazard, and a reliance on fast-tracking youth, and ended with a FA Cup Final appearance, fourth spot in the Premier League and qualification for this season's Champions League (which, by the way, Chelsea are into the last 16).

But, then, this is Chelsea. Whatever the end-of-term report last summer said has merely been compounded by the indifferent form in recent weeks, losing five of the last eight league games and, then, not losing well. Yesterday's win over Luton Town in the FA Cup Fourth Round was a welcome fillip, but with more potential banana skin league fixtures coming up with Wolves on Wednesday and Burnley on Sunday, Roman Abramovich is clearly not taking any chances. The FA Cup is one thing. The Premier League is something else entirely. 

And, so, the wheel at Chelsea Football Club turns once more, with another manager making way after a short tenure. A penny, then, for the thoughts of Pep Guardiola, Jurgen Klopp and even Ole Gunnar Solskjær, none of whom produced spectacular results in the early days of their time as managers at Manchester City, Liverpool and Manchester United, and yet have, generally, come extremely good. Lampard has had just 18 months in charge, admittedly with six or so of those with £200 million-plus worth of new players under his belt, including the likes of Timo Werner and Kai Havertz, Germans of whom much has been expected, and yet haven't yet delivered. The thinking now is that Lampard will be replaced by a German-speaking manager to get the best out of the pair, with Leipzig's Julian Nagelsmann and former PSG boss Thomas Tuchel high on the list, as well as Southampton's Ralph Hasenhüttl.

As this blog (and its predecessor) has catalogued, depressingly, Chelsea's impatience is frustrating. Then again, you could argue, somewhat coldly, that Chelsea's habit of dispensing with managers so frequently has been key to their success. It does, though, leave this fan in particular feeling dispirited. Club loyalty isn't bought by success. While we have, in the Abramovich era, enjoyed a success that wouldn't have seemed possible when I first went regularly to Stamford Bridge, with Chelsea playing in front of crowds of 7,000 in the old Second Division, we have always enjoyed a sense of entitlement to being something bigger (and in those days, far bigger than we actually were). Today, Chelsea are considered part of the "big six", a fact that still sticks in the craw of Liverpool and Manchester United fans who've experienced their own wilderness years (adding Tottenham to that cabal for good measure). But we are where we are, and Abramovich's largesse has got us there. And so it's only natural that he should be ruthless in protecting his investment. But with each managerial sacking - especially with someone universally liked, and particularly so, in the case of Lampard - a little piece of the love for Chelsea dies.

I get it. It's a business, and if you run a business badly, your board will remove you. But football is also a different animal. It's sport, performance sport. Elite players are not plug-and-play components, and while I don't even pretend to understand the science that goes into football coaching, I know that you can't just match up a coach and a set of expensively-assembled players and it all falls into place. And even when it does, new challenges come along. Again, just ask Guardiola, Klopp, Solskjær, Mourinho, Arteta or any one of the other Premier League managers who, at various times, walk the tightrope.

Time, we know, is not in the football manager's gift, and Chelsea managers in particular know this more than most. What frustrates me more than anything else about Lampard's sacking is not his exalted status as the club's all-time record goalscorer and a proper club legend, but that he hasn't been given time to develop the project. Success under Abramovich has to be instant. This, I also believe, is because he has too many people in his ear who are more concerned with what the football commentariat has to say than the actual reality. It feels like Lampard has been talked into the sack by media headlines saying that, though I'm sure the decision-making process was a lot more thorough than simply looking at the back pages.

Taking out, for a moment, the emotional attachment fans have to Lampard, he represented a challenge that always was going to need time. In his maiden season in charge, it was clear that the youngsters (and club youth products) he was forced to play, like Tammy Abraham, Mason Mount, Reece James and Callum Hudson-Odoi actually represented a promising future. They still do, of course, especially Mount, who was given the captain's armband yesterday against Luton and looked like it was his destiny, especially having been at Chelsea since he was six-years-old. Managerial comings-and-goings are part of football, so even to these youngsters Lampard's sacking won't be a surprise. These kids will not have been immune to the ruthlessness with which Abramovich has axed his managers (which isn't all that different to the attrition rate under Ken Bates). But taking the helicopter view, it's a worry that, having been brought on so far, a change of manager and the likelihood of someone with absolutely no past connection with this talented group will impede their development. Look how many loan spells Abraham had before any first team head coach would give him a start.

It remains to be seen who Chelsea will go with now, but it's safe to assume that the names of Tuchel and Nagelsmann appearing in the press is no coincidence. Tuchel, in particular, will be a divisive appointment, given his departure from PSG and the nature of his relationship with the French club's hierarchy. The bottom line, though, is that there doesn't seem to be the ideal Chelsea manager. None last long, not even a favourite son like Lampard. The last such gamble on a younger manager was André Villas-Boas, appointed in June 2011 and fired the following March. His replacement, Roberto Di Matteo - another club legend - went on to win the Champions League itself...only to be fired in the November after a dip in form. And so the cavalcade of managers - some popular choices, like Carlo Ancelotti, some less popular, like Rafa Benitez - has come and gone. At the same time, the club has won four league titles under three different managers, five FA Cup finals under as many head coaches, and three European trophies under three bosses. Yes, there may be some method in the madness, but it leaves the bitterest of tastes in the mouth. As The Times' chief football writer, Henry Winter, wrote prophetically this morning: "A personal wish would be for Lampard to be given until the end of the season, given a chance to get Chelsea back into the Champions League, and if he fails, at least Abramovich can look a club legend in the eye and say thanks but goodbye. Lampard certainly deserves that respect." That he does, that he does.