Lampard gets it wrong again as Chelsea fall 3-1 to Arsenal
When Frank Lampard's Chelsea took the field against Arsenal this evening, the club's eleven starters were worth a collective $585 million.
But despite these riches—maybe even because of them—Chelsea slumped to an embarrassing 3-1 defeat against their London rivals. It was the club's sixth straight Premier League loss and ninth straight game without a win in all competitions.
"The reality in football is that your career won't always be full of success," Lampard told the press before the match. "People will always remember the success, but part of the job is the tougher moments, whether you're a manager or a player. You can't always control the results, but you can control how you work every day."
Unfortunately for Lampard, the way he's working doesn't seem to be helping Chelsea in the slightest. His player selections were the biggest driver of Chelsea's failure this evening.
His first and most obvious mistake? A poorly shuffled midfield that struggled to play forward passes.
Lampard started both N'Golo Kanté and Enzo Fernández, two of his strongest midfield players. But he played both out of position, pushing Kanté up into an attacking winger role and Fernández back into a more defensive one. Neither player looked comfortable and both could have done the other's job considerably better than they wound up doing their own.
There were more problems up front, too. Lampard took a gamble on Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, giving him his first Premier League start since November. Aubameyang famously played for Arsenal for many years, so Lampard's logic was clear: leverage the emotion of the occasion to get a solid performance out of his striker.
It didn't pay off. Aubameyang looked bored and isolated from the first minute: Chelsea's underperforming midfield never managed to find him, and he didn't seem interested in tracking back to find them himself. Lampard subbed Aubameyang off at halftime after the striker managed just nine touches in the first forty-five minutes of play.
Plenty more went wrong for Chelsea—César Azpilicueta got terrorized by Granit Xhaka on the right flank, Wesley Fofana couldn't keep Gabriel Jesus at bay and Mateo Kovačíć failed to mark Martin Ødegaard all evening. But it all comes back to Lampard and his inability to select the right lineup. Chelsea have the largest squad in the Premier League; they cannot rely on the excuse of 'not having' the right talent to succeed. They arguably have too much talent—and Lampard doesn't know what to do with any of it.
Just five games remain in Chelsea's Premier League season to forget. The club will face 13th-placed Bournemouth and 18th-placed Nottingham Forest next—and on current form, you wouldn't bet on Chelsea to win either match. It's a worrying state of affairs for a club that has spent more money than anyone else in their orbit, and Frank Lampard knows it.
"Chelsea has been a big success for twenty years," Lampard said after the match, "but at the moment, we're not in that position."
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