Chelsea stars ‘questioned’ Lampard as he discusses Blues chaos behind-the-scenes
Frank Lampard has revealed that he was questioned by some Chelsea gamers final season when he was within the Stamford Bridge dugout. The ex-Blues interim boss struggled throughout his second managerial stint on the membership, admitting that the bloated dimension of the squad and ‘disenchanted’ gamers have been elementary points behind-the-scenes.
The ex-Everton supervisor was introduced in by Todd Boehly to try to regular the sinking ship at Chelsea after Graham Potter’s tenure, although it turned a thankless job after the membership have been dumped out of the Champions League and consequently had nothing to play for.
The former England worldwide had 32 senior gamers to work with at Chelsea, which means that confirmed stars would usually be rotated both out of the beginning eleven or the squad fully – which sparked points. Speaking in an interview with Steven Bartlett on his The Diary Of A CEO podcast, Lampard defined that he had top-quality gamers ‘questioning’ his choices attributable to how he was pressured to rotate his ranks constantly and depart gamers out.
He continued: “The biggest thing about the standards thing was the size of the squad and the motivation of players that you’re not going to play. In football, that’s a challenge with 20 players which is a modern squad.
“But Chelsea’s got very big, to the point that I can say, and I’m not criticising that player for dropping standards but I want to try and get something out of him. I would try but when you kind of look at it you go, ‘Yeah but he’s had this for a long time where he’s not playing so he’s not being competitive with that player who is playing, so that player is pretty comfortable too because he’s not pushing him’.”
Similarly to his post-match press conferences, Lampard reiterated that ‘standards’ and ‘culture’ were severely lacking at Chelsea during his time at the club, and he feels that those are two integral principles for any squad looking to achieve their goals.
Additionally, problems stemmed from some players becoming disinterested earlier in the campaign and not pushing themselves on the training pitch, Lampard continued: “I could see in training the level wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to get a result at Brentford at home or whatever, let alone Real Madrid.
“When I got there I could see the team spirit and the togetherness was not there. It was nothing bad, but you have to train elite to be elite. The minute we didn’t get through against Real, you’re into that end-of-season zone and what are you playing for and that is not the norm at Chelsea.”