When Frank Lampard agreed to become the new manager of Chelsea, it seemed like a good time for him to take the job precisely because Chelsea’s current situation was so bad.
A fanbase that had rejected the likes of Rafael Benitez and Maurizio Sarri despite their creditable performances in the job was always going to welcome Lampard, probably the best player of the Abramovich years. The transfer ban and the departure of Eden Hazard were certainly not advantages, but they would surely help to lower expectations while an inexperienced manager got to grips with the job.
But there’s managing expectations, and then there is unexpectedly selling your best central defender three days before losing your first match of the season 4-0. Lampard’s week has featured so many unpleasant surprises, nobody knows quite what to expect any more.
When reports emerged on Wednesday evening that Arsenal were trying to sign David Luiz, the initial reaction was to laugh at their incompetence. How could Arsenal expect Chelsea to sell them the leader of their defence, a player who had just signed a new two-year contract in May? How could they expect Chelsea to sell them this key player on deadline day, with no possibility of signing a replacement? The story was self-evidently ridiculous.
Incredulity
Twenty-four hours later Luiz was an Arsenal player and the focus of incredulity had shifted to Lampard. How could he possibly have thought this was a good idea? The anger of Chelsea fans towards Luiz was instructive: nobody gets angry when a bad player leaves the club. You brace for all the stuff that usually happens when a big club loses a big player, the off-the-record briefings with the inside story of why Luiz had to go, the accounts of the unprofessionalism and hysteria with which he had forced his way out of the club, the claims that he wouldn’t have played that much this season anyway, etc.
And yet when Lampard faced the media ahead of the Manchester United game there was none of that. He explained that he and Luiz had had some honest conversations, in which Luiz apparently had not threatened to strike or take other extraordinary measures, and that at the end of these honest conversations Lampard had decided that the player should go.
You can imagine that when Luiz told Lampard he wanted to leave just a few days before the start of the season, the new manager would have taken this as something of a betrayal. Nobody could blame Lampard for feeling angry. Yet he denied that the sale of Luiz had anything to do with marking his territory or showing the dressing-room who was boss. “I would never have gone out to make any form of a mark,” he said. “I think it would have been naive to try to flex my muscles or my power. I don’t need to do that... So, if it looks like that from the outside, it certainly wasn’t how I did it. It was purely football decisions on both sides.”
All this only made the story more astonishing. With Luiz having signed a new contract less than three months ago, issuing the usual proclamations about his love of the club and his excitement for the future, Chelsea’s position was rock-solid. It would have been easy for Lampard to tell Luiz that in life, if you can’t be with the one you love, you’ve got to love the one you’re with.
Instead he decided to go another way. “We have four centre-halves,” he explained. “Three full internationals, one is an under-21 international who I worked with last year. We have other players in defensive areas.”
The three internationals Lampard was talking about are Antonio Rüdiger, who thrived alongside Luiz last season, and Andreas Christensen and Kurt Zouma, who have yet to show the kind of qualities the Brazilian brought to the team: personality, leadership, composure in possession, consistently outstanding passing from the back. With Rüdiger injured, Zouma and Christensen were the central defensive partnership at Old Trafford and Zouma set a nervous tone for the defence with his first significant action of the game – a hesitant pass across the face of the box that teed up Anthony Martial for a shot. His second intervention was to bring down Marcus Rashford for the penalty that gave United the lead.
In the end Chelsea were torn apart on the counter-attack and lost 4-0. The error-strewn defending was disappointing for Lampard but even worse was how short of ideas his side looked in the second half. David Luiz might not have made a difference to Chelsea’s shambolic defending – even his biggest fans would hardly claim he is a Maldini-type who never makes mistakes – but he surely would have helped them use the ball better.
David Luiz played 41 through-balls in the Premier League last season – more than any other player. The figure is especially impressive as nearly every time Luiz played a through-ball he first had to ignore a shout from his team-mate Jorginho, the ball-hogging midfielder who is second on the list with 34. The next few names on the list are those conventionally thought of as creative players – Christian Eriksen (24), James Maddison (22), Felipe Anderson (22) and Mo Salah (19).
Hazard was already leaving by the time Lampard arrived; there was nothing he could do to prevent the player leaving and taking Chelsea’s cutting edge with him. But the decision to sell the best passer among Premier League defenders was his own, and over the next few weeks it will be interesting to see where the creativity in his new-look Chelsea is going to come from.
