Frank Lampard is back in management and proving people wrong.
He arrived to little fanfare at Coventry City back in November, tasked with the near-impossible challenge of replacing the immensely popular Mark Robins.
Scepticism was high after challenging tenures for him at Everton and Chelsea, but Lampard is proving his credentials in steering the Sky Blues back in the right direction after a shaky start to the season.
‘From the cusp of the bottom three to the verge of the play-off places’
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
Sky Sports’ Gary Weaver tells the Essential EFL podcast about the job that Frank Lampard has done at Coventry City
“He’s done amazingly well,” Sky Sports’ Gary Weaver told the Essential EFL podcast.
“The performance data with Coventry before he came in did suggest that Coventry should be top six, but they weren’t getting the results under Mark Robins at that point.
“It was a sad end for him, but Frank has got them doing what the data suggested they should be doing.
“They were two points off the drop when he came in, and now they are knocking on the door of the play-offs.
“They’ve shown they can grind out results as well, like they did at Sheffield Wednesday a couple of weeks ago. Wednesday played well, but Coventry came away with the win.
“He’s got them back into a 4-3-3 now, and Matt Grimes is huge in that midfield after signing from Swansea in January. They’ve won three games on the bounce since he came in and he’s making his presence felt in that midfield.
“Jack Rudoni has been excellent as well, and Ephron Mason-Clark has been doing the business, which you kind of think he would be able to do after switching from Peterborough.”
‘Every day is as competitive as the last’
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
Coventry midfielder Ephron Mason-Clark tells Sky Sports about life under Lampard
Winger Mason-Clarke, who has thrived under Lampard, admits the head coach carried a real aura about him when he first arrived at the club.
“I would definitely be lying if I said that [awe] wasn’t there at first,” Mason-Clark told Sky Sports. “But that quickly faded when you just got into management mode.
“Learning the things that he wants to implement for the team has been easy to understand. Working under him and Joe [Edwards, Lampard’s assistant] has been really positive for me and for the team as well.
“Every day is as competitive as the last. You see that all the time, whether it’s the rondos or the playthroughs we do. Everybody’s just on it every single day.
“At the moment we’re just trying to fine-tune the small things in our performance. That is something that he concentrates on a lot with the details of how we’re playing.”
‘Lampard has turned around early pessimism and lifted fans’
Coventry fan Matt Quigg, CCFC Live
We had suffered another slow start to the season, but fans were still outraged at the decision to sack Robins and replaced him with Lampard.
Initial pessimism and deflation has subsided, however. So far it has proved to be the correct decision, results have turned and we have gone from looking like a poor bottom-half side to serious play-off contenders playing decent football – even with key players missing during his tenure, such as Haji Wright, Mason-Clark and captain Ben Sheaf.
There has been a real sense of uplift in spirit and feeling around the club. Signings such as Grimes and Jamie Paterson have added real Championship experience to the horde of arrivals last summer, and showed Lampard’s intent to really push for promotion.
It seemed unthinkable a few months ago that we’d be able to move on from Robins as our leader in the dugout. But the results have been so good under Lampard and he’s now having his name chanted among the home support.
Can he go one better than last time?
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
How to use Sky Sports+ to watch this weekend’s action
Sky Sports EFL editor Simeon Gholam:
Lampard managed one full season in the Championship before, taking Derby County to the play-off final, where they lost at Wembley to Aston Villa.
That campaign, 2018/19, was one of the most dramatic in recent second-tier history, with Marcelo Bielsa, ‘Spygate’ and their incredible semi-final comeback over Leeds United.
Despite falling just short, Lampard did enough to earn a move back to Chelsea that summer, and since then there have been several fairly different takes on whether he was a success at Derby or not.
He built a side around several young loanees – notably Mason Mount, Fikayo Tomori and Harry Wilson, who provided obvious quality at this level but were all still young at the time. Some since have suggested a team with that core should have finished higher than sixth and earned promotion, but they were up against a Villa side fielding the likes of John McGinn, Tyrone Mings, Jack Grealish and Tammy Abraham. And that team only finished fifth.
Derby did not fare well in the years after, and some of the spending that season on wages certainly did not help. But broadly, from my perspective, Lampard did a good job for that year purely from a coaching capacity.
He had the ability to succeed at this level, and taking over a wildly underachieving Coventry side has proved fruitful so far. The last two play-off places are wide open, and Lampard’s side currently look well-placed to stroll through that door.
Once there in the end-of-season showdown, anything is possible.
