Frank Lampard feels pressure after Chelsea’s loss to Leicester: what is the style of the Blues? | Football news

Chelsea succumbed to their fifth loss in eight Premier League games, against Leicester on Tuesday night, and it was well deserved. While Brendan Rodgers’ team moved to the top of the table, Frank Lampard’s men languish in the eighth and in worst form of any top half team.

The conversation about a title challenge has been halted, and as the man himself admitted, it is Lampard’s future as a manager that is under scrutiny now. Club legend or not, that’s a bit of a surprise right now and not just because of the generous summer spending. Without an improvement in the second half of the campaign, only José Mourinho’s lousy final season will save Chelsea their worst points streak of the century so far.

How much time will Lampard be given to correct course? The unique circumstances of this season should ensure some sympathy as he tries to assimilate the players. But are the signs clear enough that Chelsea are on the right track?

The heated discussion about Monday night football Between Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville he focused on Manchester United, but feels just as relevant to Chelsea. Neville noted that United needed their baseline to advance five yards to become a title-winning team and proceeded to argue that it was the identity of the staff that prevented that from happening.

Carragher saw it as a training problem. Why can’t Manchester United do that now? Harry Maguire and Victor Lindelof aren’t the fastest, but neither are Ruben Dias and John Stones. Liverpool remain committed to squeezing the game despite having Fabinho and Jordan Henderson as central defenders.

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History is full of coaches who will argue that they would have played completely differently if they only had the players. But the best ones tend to establish their style of play first: embedding it in the team culture, training their team on a specific approach, and then improving players over time.

Pep Guardiola did not shy away from passing out from behind when he arrived at Manchester City and was not afraid of leaving his team vulnerable to counterattack despite aging wingers who could not move up and down the field effectively. . He established his way of playing.

When Guardiola acquired full-backs who could make sense of his style and a goalkeeper capable of inspiring confidence even while leaving space behind, success was soon seen as inevitable.

Jurgen Klopp had to wait four years for his first trophy as Liverpool manager, but the transformation in the style of the team was evident within days of his arrival. He vowed to counter pressure with an unrecognizable lineup that would become world champions.

When Klopp hired a reliable goalkeeper and a center-back capable of dominating while squeezing space, the team’s faith in his methods was vindicated and consistency remained.

Meanwhile, it was the clarity of the idea that sustained the players, fans and owners, inspiring what turned out to be a justified belief that success was just around the corner.

Is Lampard’s Chelsea on that same journey? They’ve added a new goalkeeper of their own in Edouard Mendy, but that superficial similarity could be where the comparison begins and ends.

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There is little sense of a clearly defined style of play at the moment.

With Lampard, Chelsea pass the ball for long periods, but not as much as they did that season with Maurizio Sarri and not as much as Manchester City or Liverpool.

They push high up the field to force mistakes, but not as much as their rivals, and certainly not as much as a team with a clearly defined philosophy like Ralph Hasenhuttl’s Southampton.

It could be generously seen as a hybrid model, but does that hide the lack of an idea? There are principles, of course. Lampard calls for hard work and an attacking mentality, but what coach doesn’t? Where is the general plan that will generate the success that is demanded at Chelsea?

Whether it’s the win over Fulham at the weekend or the loss to Leicester on Tuesday night, it has been hard to watch so far.

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“They were sharper than us, they ran faster than us,” Lampard said. Sky sports. “The basics and the bare minimum is running, sprinting and covering ground – a lot of our players didn’t.”

For what it’s worth, despite his languid-looking moves, Kai Havertz covered more ground than anyone else on the floor before his replacement in the second half. Christian Pulisic did more high-intensity sprints than anyone else, running 11 kilometers. Mateo Kovacic and Mason Mount reached that total as well, the latter looking physically exhausted in the final stages of the match.

One wonders what they could do with evaluating their efforts, concluding that the result might have been different if only they had worked harder. “It’s a great lesson for some of our players,” added Lampard. But on the return trip from Leicester, there may be other lessons as well.

James Maddison gave an enlightening interview to Sky sports then in which he touched on similar issues such as unity and work rhythm, but also explained how the team had analyzed the Chelsea set pieces, in addition to pointing out the important tactical adjustment made in the interval.

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“Thanks to the manager too,” Maddison said. “We made a little change at halftime to almost go 4-4-2 out of possession, 4-3-3 in possession. Just little things like that, thinking on our feet. We faced threats that came our way and I thought that we deserved all three points. “

Chelsea was outmatched this time as much as he was outmatched.

Lampard had started with Jorginho and N’Golo Kante seven times this season, but chose not to do so away from home against Leicester.

In the absence of a more natural midfielder, it was too easy for Man of the Match Maddison to find a space in front of the Chelsea defense or for Youri Tielemans to get into it.

The result was that, for the sixth time this season, Chelsea failed to win a match against the current top six in the Premier League. Add in last month’s losses to Wolves and Arsenal, and Lampard’s team has yet to beat any of the top eight from last season. When they have to rely on more than individual skill, when faced with well-trained opponents with quality, they fall short.

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At Sky sports study, Jamie Redknapp admitted that the team seemed to have come together and that’s a feeling that, mid-season, is hard to undo.

Thiago Silva and Antonio Rudiger, now back in favor, played together for the first time at Fulham, so it is perhaps unrealistic to expect them to have forged an understanding in a matter of days.

But partnerships seem awkward across the field for Chelsea. The line of attack has also changed from game to game in the apparent hope that something will click. This was the first look at the combination of Pulisic, Tammy Abraham and Callum Hudson-Odoi; What will be seen next?

There will be pleas for time and Lampard mentioned that word “transition” again in his post-match interview. There is some truth to that and it would be a shame to completely abandon the notion that his Chelsea is still taking shape, especially after the optimism of his first season in charge.

But while Guardiola and Klopp had their stellar work at previous clubs to help build the belief that investing in them for the long term would reap rewards, trust in Lampard requires a leap of faith.

“Our sharpness was not there,” he said of this latest loss.

“Sometimes that is related to bad form, but those are moments where you have to dig deep. Five losses in eight is not where we want to be, it will take a lot of character to come back from that.”

No one can doubt the character of Lampard. But perhaps the character of their players is not the explanation for their struggles either.

“When I got into this job, the administration job, you understand that some things are out of your control.”

But Chelsea’s style of play really shouldn’t be one of them.