Hero Frank Lampard saves ‘rudderless’ Chelsea; Liverpool to SOMEHOW finish in top four

Editor F365
Frank Lampard and Liverpool celebration

Frank Lampard is already being absolved of any and all blame for Chelsea and should we pretend Liverpool will finish in the top four?

 

Rudder nonsense
The back pages are dominated by Chelsea owner Todd Boehly’s dressing-room dressing-down of his players, and The Sun man Andy Dillon (a Hammer through and through) chips in with his entirely objective opinion.

Dillon is absolutely right to say that Boehly has made his own mistakes but Mediawatch was largely amused by this paragraph, which is so very typical of an English media that will conspire to make Frank Lampard – three games, three defeats – utterly blameless in this Chelsea disaster:

‘Stamford Bridge is an overcrowded, frustrated place and if it was not for Frank Lampard stepping in to help out as interim boss, the team would be rudderless.’

Thank you Frank. What a hero. Shall we just ignore the fact that Chelsea picked up a draw v Liverpool with Bruno on the touchline before Lampard ‘stepped in to help out’ with three straight defeats? Does it still count as a ‘rudder’ if it’s made of pure sh*t and dissolves in the water?

A similar song is being sung by Oliver Holt in the Daily Mail, who writes at length about the cartoonish behaviour of Boehly and obviously Lampard emerges entirely blameless.

Mediawatch will remind you – because they won’t – that Chelsea lost to Brighton on Saturday and allowed the Seagulls 26 shots. Twenty-six shots.

And yet here is Holt:

‘And then he chose Frank Lampard – a good manager and a decent man – to bring some sort of order to the chaos, presumably because he thought a Chelsea legend who might just be the club’s greatest ever player could act as a human shield for him and the rest of the board. That worked well.’

‘A good manager’ who has now suffered seven consecutive defeats to make it one win, two draws and 14 losses(!) in his last 17 games. If that’s a ‘good manager’, what makes a sh*t one? Presumably somebody who is less of a ‘decent man’. And quite a lot less English.

 

Waiting for a star to fall
But obviously the real juice is in pretending that Liverpool can/will finish in the top four after tw*tting Leeds 6-1 on Monday night.

‘Liverpool run-in compared to rivals as top four hopes sparked by thrashing of Leeds’ says the Mirror, who really do want you to ignore the fact that the win over a rotten Leeds was their first in five games.

They are currently nine points behind Newcastle (admittedly with a game in hand) but the Mirror insist that ‘it isn’t impossible though, given the nature of the chase that is unfolding, and the fallibilities of the teams involved’.

The ‘fallibilities of the teams involved’? Of the five teams above Liverpool and below Arsenal and Manchester City, only Tottenham are in worse form than Liverpool. Over the last six games, Liverpool have picked up eight whole points, which is considerably less than Aston Villa (16) and Newcastle United (15) and rather a lot less than Brighton (11) and Manchester United (10).

We would suggest that the most fallible team is the one that lost 1-0 to Bournemouth the week after battering Manchester United.

As the Mirror’s own David Maddock writes elsewhere: ‘It was only their fourth away win of the season, and comes far too late to revive their Champions League hopes. The reason? Before this one-sided game, Liverpool had actually failed to score away from home in the Premier League against any of the teams currently in the bottom half this season.’

It’s almost like they’re fallible.

Over at Goal, they are keen to pick up some of those desperate Liverpool clicks:

‘Debate: Can Liverpool pull off Champions League qualification despite nightmare season?’

Short answer: No.

Do we really have to pretend that ‘they finally looked something close to their best as they mauled Leeds United at Elland Road on Monday night’, just a few weeks after the mauled Manchester United and then promptly lost to Bournemouth and failed to win in four games?

‘Such an ominous performance does raise the question: can Liverpool SOMEHOW snatch Champions League qualification this season?!’

They can SOMEHOW do that if all the better sides above them SOMEHOW all go shit at the same time, yes.

 

Super trooper
Thankfully The Sun have access to a supercomputer (or at least access to e-mails from betting companies) and then can confirm that actually, Liverpool will finish in seventh, which seems absolutely apt for probably the seventh best side this season.

But who will win the Premier League title? Hopefully not Arsenal as that would be bad for football; another team should not beat Manchester City to the title because then that would suggest that other teams can beat Manchester City to the title.

‘Well, the algorithm produced by bettingexpert.com now has Man City as the narrow favourites to clinch the title.

‘But they can only separate the two title contenders on goal difference – with Guardiola’s men projected to claim a fifth Premier League in six years as a result of scoring more and conceding fewer.’

Nice explanation of the concept of goal difference there.

So we now know – via the ‘supercomputer’ which is actually just an algorithm – that both Manchester City and Arsenal will end the season on 86.6 points, which is somehow more believable than Lampard’s Chelsea somehow picking up another 8.5 points this season.