MY ACCOUNT
Safe to say Frank Lampard was the only Champions League coach required to give an earnest answer on the eve of this week’s matches about the role a late-night US TV host might have had in his appointment.
But then Lampard was also the only Champions League coach expecting to watch along from home with James Corden and the rest as recently as a week ago.
If Thomas Tuchel’s appointment at Bayern Munich between the last 16 and the quarter-finals came out of left field, he at least had history in this competition, replacing Lampard as Chelsea boss in 2020-21 and leading them to European glory.
Lampard won the Champions League as a player, of course, in another example of a successful mid-season Chelsea coaching change.
The parallels with that other season of struggle in 2011-12 have not been lost on Lampard. “He mentioned he was in his worst moment at Chelsea,” said Enzo Fernandez. “It is a great example for us.”
But that likely makes Lampard the only coach to look at Roberto Di Matteo’s improbable title run 11 years ago as a blueprint for success moving forward.
In fact, Di Matteo led Chelsea to a top-six Premier League finish and an FA Cup triumph before winning the Champions League. Lampard’s side are 11th and out of the domestic cups.
Hopes of a repeat of that greatest win of all are all but gone, too, after Real Madrid’s 2-0 victory in the first leg of their last-eight tie.
Lampard’s will surely be the only shock Chelsea comeback this season.
The Blues, still under Tuchel, did very nearly overturn a two-goal deficit against Madrid at this stage last season, leading 3-0 at the Santiago Bernabeu before late goals from Rodrygo and Karim Benzema took the eventual champions through.
That was the theme of Madrid’s campaign, rarely playing well but having enough in the big moments. The concern for Chelsea is their hosts were again a little below par on Wednesday and this time did not need any of those big moments, deservedly defeating their toothless side.
Madrid scraped past Liverpool and Chelsea last season and are on course to knock out both again this year – with the minimum of fuss. Again getting the better of Manchester City in the next stage may well prove tougher.
Lampard appeared to look back to those famous nights under Di Matteo as he turned to experience for this first leg, making only two changes from the last-16 second leg against Borussia Dortmund but increasing the average age of the XI by two years in introducing Thiago Silva and N’Golo Kante.
“We always want to develop players, we want young players, all these things,” he explained to BT Sport. “But at a game of this high level, players like Thiago, N’Golo in the team are a huge lift for us.”
That know-how still paled next to Madrid’s, however. There were 821 Champions League appearances in the home XI – the second-most in competition history behind another Madrid line-up in the 2018 final.
It was fitting then that Benzema should net the opener in his 149th Champions League game, fifth on the all-time list and in the right place at the right time when Kepa Arrizabalaga could only parry an awkward effort from Vinicius Junior.
Lampard might well have taken a 1-0 defeat at that point. He certainly would have when half-time was reached with Madrid having aimed eight shots on target and then again when Ben Chilwell was sent off with over half an hour remaining.
The game briefly became reminiscent of the 2012 semi-final in Barcelona, where John Terry saw red but Chelsea somehow recovered a 2-2 draw through a combination of brave defending and clinical counter-attacking.
Yet Marco Asensio’s second with 74 minutes played, steered through Wesley Fofana’s legs, broke their resolve and might well have taken the tie away from Lampard.
This Chelsea team are anything but clinical. They have 41 goals in 41 games this season, going four without scoring – including in two matches under Lampard – for the first time since 1993. The Blues have only netted more than once, as they now must, in 14 of those games.
Failure to buck that trend against Champions League specialists Madrid will mean the end of Chelsea’s season.
At that point, as Madrid move on and Lampard attempts to rescue a top-10 position in the Premier League, focus turns to where Todd Boehly goes next, perhaps to who Jimmy Kimmel fancies for the Stamford Bridge hotseat.
It has been another season to remember at Chelsea – for all the wrong reasons.
