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.

Red Rain

Picture: Getty Images

This is going to sound bitter and twisted, but saturated media coverage this morning of Liverpool's first league title in 30 years - and their first of the Premier League era - comes across as a birthright fulfilled. There's no doubt that Liverpool have deserved this season's title: the 23-point margin (currently) between them and chasers Manchester City, with seven games still to go, is testament to the clever football Jürgen Klopp has been applying at the Merseyside club. But, much like England addressing its own 54 years of hurt (and counting), no one is entitled. Blanket press today of Liverpool being crowned champions without, last night, kicking a ball feels a little overblown, especially when you read The Times' chief football writer Henry Winter's report on Chelsea's win over City last night, which handed Liverpool the title. It took Winter at least the first quarter of his piece before it even mentioned Chelsea, let alone that they'd won what was an entertaining and, unlike many in this restarted season, engaging game.

We Chelsea fans will be accused of pettiness when it comes to any suggestion of dismissiveness. In the 1970s and 80s, when Chelsea were, frankly, nobodies, Liverpool's hegemonic presence in domestic and European football gave them a regal air. Even in my native pocket of south-west London - surely prime Chelsea country - there were Liverpool fans aplenty (along with Ipswich fans at my junior school due to that club's brief period of supremacy). When the 90s arrived, along with Sky's first mega deal with the-then new Premier League (in which I played a teeny-tiny part, working on the presentation to the BSkyB board that secured agreement to propose a £304 million, five-year contract), the balance of power shifted. Football was in a fragile state, especially post-Heysel and post-Hillsborough, the double stadium tragedies that Liverpool and its fans had been sadly caught up in. With the Premier League and football's new money, Manchester United became the new power with Surrey its minted, middle class fanbase, as had been the case during Liverpool's previous years of authority. With this historical context, there is still no real reason why Chelsea fans should bear any animosity towards Liverpool, any more than any other team you could mention. There is certainly no geographic proximity, unlike Tottenham or Arsenal. But there is, though, form. Lots of form. 

Let's start with a certain Jesper Grønkjær, the Danish winger who, on 11 May 2003, changed the lives of Chelsea fans forever with the "billion pound goal" - cutting in from the right and beating at least three defenders to blast past Liverpool keeper Jerzy Dudek. It was a goal that rather stunned us in the Stamford Bridge East Stand. It would be a while before its impact sunk in. Grønkjær's goal secured a 2-1 win and a fourth-place finish for Chelsea, at Liverpool's expense. Chelsea qualified for Europe. Legend has it that this convinced Roman Abramovich to buy the club, and not Liverpool, prompting a period of unprecedented success, not to mention unprecedented resources, a core element of the story. Liverpool, the working class representatives of English football tradition, Chelsea, the now arriviste club from a part of London associated with poshness.

We move on, then, to the era of greatest niggle, with José Mourinho - and his particular brand of toxicity - in the blue corner, and Rafa Benitez in the red corner. To some, it became a tiresome clash of egos, to others, pure box office. Chelsea, under Mourinho, were mounting a blitzkrieg-speed assault on English football, in a way never managed in their golden phases of the mid-'50s and late-'60s. In the Portuguese coach, we had a Special One who could never be accused of lacking confidence. His capricious rival, Benitez, like predecessor Gérard Houllier, couldn't help feeling he was battling ghosts from the club's past. First blood was drawn in February 2005 when Chelsea beat Liverpool 2-3 in the League Cup Final at Cardiff's Millennium Stadium. To say it was tempestuous is understatement: Riise put Liverpool ahead after a minute, but it wouldn't be until the 78th minute that the advantage would be reduced by a Steven Gerard own goal. Tee, and indeed, hee. Three goals followed in extra time: Didier Drogba and Mateja Kežman putting Chelsea in the lead, Antonio Núñez giving Liverpool faint hope by a goal in the 113th.

Battle lines were crossed next later that season in the Champions League semi-final. By then, Chelsea had won the Premier League by a record-breaking 95 points, and all in Mourinho's first season in English football. It was also Chelsea's first league title in 50 years. Before drawing Liverpool, Mourinho had also dispatched Barcelona and Bayern Munich. The semi-final was, thus, deliciously set up, though this wasn't matched by the first leg, at Stamford Bridge, which ended 0-0. The second leg at Anfield, however, was a different affair. Mourinho stoked things before kickoff by saying that the pressure was on Liverpool ("We’ll go back to London as heroes, independent of the result"). Febrile from the start, within four minutes Petr Čech brought down Milan Baroš only for referee Lubos Michael to wave play-on. Luis Garcia caught on to the loose ball and scored...or so it appeared. In a time before goal-line technology, William Gallas looked to have cleared the ball, but Michael awarded the goal regardless, perhaps convinced by the emphatic celebrations of the Liverpool players. Even to this day, it's not clear that it was a goal. Mourinho still goes on about it. Garcia has since trolled Chelsea by dressing as a ghost for fancy dress parties. Liverpool went on to a final with Milan in Istanbul, arguably producing the greatest comeback in European football history. Liverpool and Chelsea went on to develop an even greater rivalry, meeting a further 20 times in domestic and European competitions within the next four years. In fact, at one point, the number of times the two clubs met in both league and cup competitions became yawningly tiresome for both sets of fans.

Another fissure became Mourinho's relationship with Liverpool's Steven Gerrard. As Scouse as chip butties and Brookside, the midfielder handed in a transfer request in the summer of 2005, barely weeks after that night in Istanbul. Chelsea tried to sign him (Mourinho would attempt again at Inter Milan and Real Madrid) after the Reds' skipper had decided to "roll a hand grenade into the Liverpool boardroom" when contract talks broke down. Gerrard was eventually won round by Liverpool, but the episode made its mark on Mourinho, who would later describe the midfielder as "one of my favourite enemies". The Mourinho-Gerrard axis remained part of the clubs' rivalry: on Mourinho's return to Chelsea in 2013, the away fixture at Anfield led to Manchester City winning the league title (an ironic twist on last night's fixture). In a Mourinho tactical masterclass, Chelsea monstered Liverpool, despite them being on an imperious, 16-game unbeaten run. Title denied. The cherry on the cake - celebrated seven years hence - happened on the stroke of half-time: Gerrard mistimed a routine pass which fell for Chelsea's Demba Ba. To make matters worse, the midfielder fell over while trying to recover the ball, freeing Ba to score. Blues supporters have never let Gerrard forget the slip. "I’m not going to get drawn into wishing the Chelsea fans well," he would later say, adding "it was nice of them to turn up, for once today". Ouch. 

"I’ll be honest. I couldn’t stand you as a club," another dyed-in-the-wool Liverpool figure, Jamie Carragher, would tell Frank Lampard, now the Chelsea manager, and ever-present in this enduring period. "It surpassed Everton and Manchester United as our rivalry for a period." With Chelsea and Liverpool being drawn, yet again, in the 2008 Champions League semi-final, the Londoners ended up winning 4-3 on aggregate, with Lampard scoring the conclusive goal with a penalty in extra time. His mother, Pat, had died of pneumonia just six days before, leading to an emotionally charged goal celebration. The clubs would meet again in the following season's Champions League, this time in the quarter-final, and again with Chelsea winning the tie, 7-5 on aggregate. No one could say these encounters were anything less than value-for-money.

Another twist of the knife came in 2011 when Fernando Torres joined Chelsea from Liverpool in an end-of-window January transfer. The conventional wisdom is that any major name switching clubs in January will not, usually, be all that much (if you're of value you'd surely stay for the duration of the season). And thus it proved. Some revisionists have claimed that the Spaniard's time at Chelsea wasn't that bad - he did, at least, play a role in the 2012 Champions League title, after all - but for the most part, Torres was torrid. In that initial half-season he scored once in 18 outings, hardly a return for a striker of his repute. Despite twice being Anfield's record highest scorer, the magic never moved with him to Chelsea - 45 goals in 172 appearances, as opposed to 81 goals in 142 appearances for Liverpool. Some might say, cheekily, that offloading Torres was Liverpool's ultimate revenge. Some might counter that by saying that, by joining Chelsea, he achieved his ambition to win titles, something he'd felt had eluded him in the north-west. Champions League, Europa League and FA Cup winners medals gives some credence to that theory.

There is far more richness to the Liverpool-Chelsea story than one blog post can convey, even one as lengthy as this. Chelsea's role in Liverpool's first league title since 1990 is, really, one of happenstance. "I don't think this game decided the title," Lampard said after last night's win over Manchester City. "That was decided a long time ago by Liverpool's consistency and wins. We need to congratulate Liverpool. Fair play to them, give them full credit. They deserve to win it." A moment of understated diplomacy in the history of Chelsea and Liverpool, a rivalry I've always equated with Subbuteo - the quintessential reds-versus-blues match-up. 

For a while to come, there will be Chelsea fans begrudging Liverpool's victory, challenging the cult of Klopp and the belief of many on Merseyside that a title was overdue. I won't deny my own "meh" response this morning as breakfast TV seemed to cover nothing else. But having queued along the King's Road in 2005, 2006, 2010, 2015 and 2017, to watch an open-topped bus bearing a victorious squad, it is a delicious feeling to be champions, and I can understand fully the desire for it to be restored. I didn't expect it in 2005, and the novelty hadn't worn off in 2017, either. Liverpool may have only just added a 19th league title, worthily, even in this strange season, and it would be utterly churlish to claim Chelsea's help, but as smouldering red flares are still being doused in the streets around Anfield, it should be reminded that the hard work is still to come. The title defence next season will come against determined opposition. One particular rival amongst them.