Making Your Mind Up (Again)

Three defeats in succession.
Three-nil win.
MAKE YOUR MINDS UP, JOURNALISTS!?!

It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Or in the words of Matthew Fialka: “It’s all a game – I hope…”.


Some clubs require more revolution than evolution, meaning the long game is to be played out in bad times as well as good.

For others, time is not a commodity for doling out liberally, as one of the greatest players born in Merseyside has discovered this week.

Many pundit journalists will no doubt be adding that Gerrard’s sacking buried bad speculation about Lampard’s immediate future – or should I quote:
‘the future of a manager at a certain club we’re [apparently] allergic to mentioning its name’.


The reality is that there are many clubs who have squads far better than ours.

The reality also is that (mercifully) there are more than enough clubs employing talented with players, but for whom the novelty of playing in the Premier League wears off quicky enough in preventing us being dislodgable (a new word for those history-haters to coin). ‘Dislodgable’; albeit you’d struggle to believe it if you were to research the number of times we’ve been in the relegation zone, in cold weather months, throughout the Premier League-era.


So, for the positive spin:

What was so positive in the three recent defeats, and (at the same time), worthy of brutally-honest critique a 3-0 home win against a team inclined to rent their ground out for goodness knows how many decades?


My response is to begin by asking the question:

“What has Lamaprd himself achieved over the past three months-alone, that we didn’t already know about him in his previous work as a professional football club manager?”

And to start to answer this, a very brief comparison to a previous manager’s success in the Summer transfer windows, purely for the sake of highlighting the greater potential for any manager to see through progress upon give the chance to buy his own favoured players…


December 2019:

An experienced AND gifted manager inherits a club in the [you-know-what] zone for the [you-all-know-how-many] times.

Limps through to top flight survival, being defeated at Anfield in the Cup by [you-know-who’s] 3rd choice players, before surrendering 1-0 at Spurs against a team that could quite easily have annihilated us 5-0 IF they’d needed to do so.


Our best transfer window, possibly of our club’s entire history (you heard right, national history-haters) and the same opponents, coached by the same Mourinho, are beaten 0-1 at the same venue to kick-off the 2020-21 campaign.

The very fast start couldn’t be sustained sufficiently to qualify for Europe, but a top-half finish offers our club short-term breathing space.

Fast forward two years; it’s a similar scenario.

Lampard and Moshiri clearly leave one-another in no uncertain terms of the state of the club, and what is necessary in the short-term, as well as long.
Lampard gets just enough money to replace many of the one-track-ponies previously bought on the cheap (in Premier League currency terms)
and does a superb job in persuading enough personnel of sufficient quality, purpose and vision to apply themselves to our cause.

And not only the hiring;

the likes of Amadou Onana and Dwight McNeil have (in professional sporting terms) required very little time to understand their team-mates repertoire and fit into a favoured Lampard system and gameplan.

One point from the opening nine; the knives were already sharpening the Nottingham Forest draw a chilling afternoon’s viewing for those who could see just how incapable we were of passing with conviction – AT HOME, against modest opposition, until Steve Cooper decided to gametime manage Jesse Lingard and we snatched a draw from an imminent defeat.

Like the West Ham win, and – if we’re brutally-honest with ourselves, the Palace win yesterday – quality was, at best, in moments of flashes, as a team. All individual players trying their best, of course. But as a team, in a team sport, modest opposition were dragging us down, though in some cases, opposition doing so in admirable circumstances.

Yet despite all the struggles, these results shared something in common: getting acceptable results without functioning to optimum performance, or 'winning when playing [less than your best]', so the cliché goes.

A cliché used in all sports at all times, yet one that becomes harder and harder to produce when standards go up-and-up in quality.

Turn this on its’ head: playing better opposition and whist not being embarrassed, losing in frustrating terms; where do we assess ourselves in the United and Spurs defeats?


Well, scoring early against United at home and seeing the game out last March and then taking and early lead against United three Sundays ago and being comfortably beaten, if not embarrassed –

HOW MUCH have WE progressed since March and HOW MUCH have UNITED silently improved under a better manager?

We are not the only football club in the UK who are grossly under-achieving.

United need no encouraging to pass the ball forwards, with one touch, at speed and all make themselves available to do so. This didn’t happen in the Spring because of collective attitude problems. I strongly add that Allan had a great game that Saturday lunchtime in giving composure in possession to OUR team-mates play when we had the ball in positions dangerous to United’s goal threat, but the point was that we were a shambles of a roster playing as a team – against a star-studded opposition with players clearly needing to look themselves in the mirror and ask: “Why are you actually bothering to try and be a footballing ‘role model’?”.

It would seem that the 4-0 Brentford embarrassment and a laying down of the law by newly-hired Eric Ten Haag has brought purpose back to United.

Against us, they passed the ball forwards more than we did – for two reasons (money-side):

1. Quicker, more muscular, better-balanced physique players.
2. More experience of playing against better TEAMS.

Neither of these can we compete with in a short space of time (FFP and all that).

The crime we all must avoid from now-on is NOT to resent the fact that United out-performed us. Instead, we need to learn from what they did BETTER than us – a crime we have committed too many times over the past 50-odd years.

Then, from being beaten against a better team, we face a trip to a venue where lest Spring we were walloped 5-0. Not exactly the first time in recent memory we’ve been taken apart by that very scoreline against decent opposition, but the Premier League points tally has to come from somewhere.

Lampard is missing Patterson’s relentless energy on the right flank through the Scot’s injury.

He therefore adjusts this with a 4-5-1 formation;
McNeil switched to the left flank with Mykolenko
and Iwobi’s ever-willing appetite for graft supporting an equally-willing but ageing Coleman (a combination that against weak opposition like Norwich City, has worked in the not-too-distant past).

Along with this, a game plan change.

Lampard knows that Spurs (at the very least) are a little better than us in every department, meaning we have to fight to play the game a way that suits our team’s combined repertoire more than theirs.

Getting men behind the ball – hardly rocket science, but for 25-odd minutes, Spurs’ 90% possession results in very little end product. This was partly down to Lampard’s instructions for our players to pass the ball safely and accurately, if backwards when necessary. Opposing Tottenham players lulled into a false sense of complacency, two counter-attacks are given to us.

The reason why those Gray & Onana counter-attacks DON’T end in goals?
Being able to dribble with possession as quickly as defenders can sprint back AND retain prime position to load the trigger – and shoot with conviction – is a talent few seem to appreciate. Lionel Messi and Gareth Bale are two prime examples of this, but Mo Salah and Anthony Martial are too. It may help to explain why Liverpool and Manchester United have scored so many goals since the ‘penalty crackdown’ on defenders; having prime control of the ball, in your opponent’s penalty area – you’re going to cause panic – and tackling mistakes.

So it's far from entirely bad luck that the ball doesn’t sit right for Demarai and Amadou, just when we really needed a goal to hit superiority-complex opposition where it hurts most. But top players seldom come cheap, so upgrading on Goodison Park’s capacity it has to be.

Lampard’s gameplan at Spurs was spot-on. So was his team selection and formation, in the circumstances he faced.

It shouldn’t be compared to something like a less talented snooker player deliberately turning down long potting opportunities (in fear of missing) and therefore taking the pressure off a rival snooker players’ safety game.

It was a very tough ask to get a result, away, against a recent Champions’ League-finalist. We simply didn’t have enough quality, excellent signings Gray and Onana may well have been for us.

We may not exactly have the most talented squad of players in the Premier League, let alone the world, yet analysing the detail of the marathon that is the footballing season remains fascinating – regardless of whether reports like this enthral you or not.

I, like many, were fearing the worst when one Champions’ League-winning manager walked out on us, and his successor – though admirably qualified, simply got it horribly wrong. ‘Who were we to turn to this time?’

Very few highly-successful players in professional football go on to be equally-successful managers. It’s two very different job roles.

I’m now very confident in going on the record to say: Lampard has a bright future ahead of him as an all-round managerial leader.