Frank Lampard backs Mason Mount and Declan Rice to be the best of enemies

Frank Lampard is confident that Mason Mount and his best friend Declan Rice will be the best enemies tomorrow night when their Chelsea and West Ham teams meet.

Both are together in the academy of the Blues and are still as thick as thieves.

But at Stamford Bridge they will both be looking to get into each other’s pockets as they try to get their respective sides back on the winning track.

“It’s healthy, it’s good,” Lampard said, when asked what it’s like to face someone close.

“The competitive nature will come to light when you play against your friends.

“Those personal battles create an extra level of competition between Mason and Declan individually and that’s fine, that’s the way it should be.

“I don’t know Declan that well, but they are both hungry young guys who want to do well for their team.”

Rice had to bounce back after being fired from the Chelsea academy and the fact that he has become a Premier League player and England international is sometimes greeted in the faces of South West Londoners.

But Lampard added: “The first thing for the academy is trying to produce players for the first team.

“The results we have had in recent years are a great indication of their work over a long period.

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“But when other players take other paths, the club should also take some credit for making them play professional football.

“When you watch the Premier League and the Championship, there are a lot of players who went through the Chelsea system.

“That is the really positive thing for us.”

Chelsea’s strong start to the season had many observers talking about them as title contenders, but back-to-back defeats by Everton and Wolves have set them back.

Lampard is experienced enough to know that every team will falter during a season and that it is up to him and older bosses like Thiago Silva and César Azpilicueta to maintain confidence in what is essentially a young group.

He said: “It is enormously important. It’s going to be a test for the players, a test for me, because my job is to pick up the players first.

“What I saw from the two games, Everton and Wolves, were things that we were doing very, very well after Leeds.

“You could say that we were in great shape and that we dropped a level in two games and we were punished.

“We got out of it a little bit, so it’s not like we were doing things terribly, we were only doing them 70 percent.

But there is not a player of the age or category of Thiago or Azpi in their careers, and Azpi is obviously younger who has not been through a period.

“It could have been one defeat that really hurt, it could be two, it could be one period and that is something football clubs have to go through, particularly with the competitive nature of the Premier League now.

“The realism is that we are not last year’s Liverpool or last year’s Manchester City, where you can go out there and win, win, win, win, win.

“In that period you have to be prepared for some difficult moments and when we are in the good moments I am always considering how to react when things change because I know they will and that is my job.”