The board goes up, signalling five minutes of stoppage time, and Frank Lampard looks nervous. He has spent the afternoon prowling his technical area, back and forth, but now his pace quickens, arms folded tightly, brow furrowed — an agitated look and a helpless feeling familiar to coaches everywhere.
His Coventry City team are hanging on at Oxford United. They have let a lead slip twice but now, 3-2 up, they just need to see this one out.
They are doing the right things, running down the clock, but then they concede a cheap free kick, then a corner. The ball runs loose and is sent goalwards, through a crowd of players. Lampard’s heart is in his mouth, but goalkeeper Oliver Dovin smothers the ball and the final whistle heralds Coventry’s eighth win in their past nine Championship matches, the club’s best run in league competition since 1969-70.
“Stressful” is how the former Chelsea and England midfielder describes those nerve-fraught closing stages, but stress immediately gives way to relief and … not quite euphoria, but certainly joy. He walks onto the pitch, bear-hugs each of his players, heads towards Coventry’s supporters and, responding to their cue, gives them a flurry of fist-pumps. He looks delighted and so do they.
How Lampard missed this during a difficult 18 months waiting for a route back into management. Not the stress, but the feeling of working all week with a team and seeing that work rewarded on a Saturday afternoon.
Coventry were 17th, just two points clear of the relegation zone, when Lampard took the job in late November. The appointment attracted cynicism amid unflattering portrayals of his tenures at Chelsea and Everton, and a desire in some quarters to write off his career prospects as a manager.
But now Coventry are fifth, in the play-off places, dreaming of promotion to the Premier League, and one of the season’s more unexpected redemption stories is beginning to take shape.
Lampard and his players celebrate the win at Oxford United (Eddie Keogh/Getty Images)
It’s Friday morning and, in a small room at Coventry’s training ground in the Warwickshire countryside, Lampard is reflecting on his first three months in the job.
He is really enjoying it, he says. “Coming in mid-season — and I’d done it before at Everton — brings a lot of challenges to work quickly to find the problems and then try to put them right,” he says. “You have to get to know the players quickly, understand the individuals and the collective. You need buy-in from the players and you want to motivate them with good training and good clarity of message. Hopefully we’ve seen that.”
He keeps emphasising the need to keep improving, not to slip into complacency or “rest on a good feeling”. He spent his whole playing career striving to be the best he could, going from a “chubby” teenager who “couldn’t get around the pitch like a top midfielder needs to” (his words) to Chelsea’s all-time record goalscorer, a great for club and country, second only to Ronaldinho for the Ballon d’Or vote in 2005.
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The question about Lampard has been about whether, having excelled in his playing career, he can be a successful manager.
This is his fifth coaching job after spells at Derby County, Chelsea, Everton and, briefly, Chelsea again on an interim basis. He has had positive experiences at all three previous clubs — leading Derby to the Championship play-off final, qualifying for the Champions League while integrating young players into the squad in his first spell at Chelsea, leading Everton to Premier League survival — but there have been struggles too and he knows there are plenty of people out there who suspect he has little to offer beyond his name.
Lampard loves “being out on the grass, working with the players” (Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images)
There has been a long history in football of top-class players finding that their abilities on the pitch have not translated to coaching or management.
The sweeping statements irk Lampard. “It’s a really lazy thing to say great players don’t make great managers,” he says. “You start listing some of them: (Zinedine) Zidane, (Carlo) Ancelotti, (Johan) Cruyff, (Pep) Guardiola… it’s just a fallacy. It’s just picking an argument with confirmation bias.”
But that trend has been more pronounced in England, where leading players have rarely seemed to have the intellect or tactical knowledge of some of their counterparts in continental Europe. The cases of Steven Gerrard, who recently left Saudi Arabian club Al Ettifaq by mutual consent, and Wayne Rooney, who won just two Championship matches out of 15 at Birmingham City and four out of 23 at Plymouth Argyle, have been added to the unhappy experiences of Gary Neville at Valencia, Sol Campbell at Southend United and Paul Scholes at Oldham Athletic in damning the managerial credentials of England’s so-called “golden generation” of players who excelled on the pitch in the 2000s.
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“There’s such a highlight on it,” he says. “I think some of it’s lazy and broad, just to view ‘the golden generation’, as it’s put, without digging a bit deeper into the job in hand for those managers and the challenges in question.”
“I always feel that anyone who goes into this job as an ex-player who’s had a highly regarded career, that in itself should get a lot of credit because you understand then that there’s a bigger fall for you. There’s a bigger level of interest in you: ‘Maybe he’ll succeed, but what if he fails?’ That’s a bit of a cultural thing. I think we can be guilty of that in this country.
“But it’s one of those where the longer you do it, the more you learn. You work and you use some of the skills you learn as a player, but more importantly you use the skills that you learn from the first day you walk into management, which I did at Derby. You learn every day from then on.”
That makes sense. What doesn’t really make sense in football is that, particularly as a big-name ex-player, you can be hired as a manager with very little coaching experience … but that there is such a short window to learn on the job before you are written off.
Lampard felt far more qualified as a manager for the experiences he had at Derby, Chelsea, Everton and even that brief unhappy interim spell back at Chelsea. But would he get another opportunity to show what he had learned?
Lampard managing Chelsea in the Champions League in February 2020 (GLYN KIRK/AFP via Getty Images)
Since leaving Chelsea at the end of the 2022-23 season, Lampard enjoyed his time off, doing some punditry work (notably for the BBC at last summer’s European Championship finals in Germany) and spending time with his family.
He liked the media work, he says — “It’s a much easier life, that’s for sure, and you work with great people” — so why was he so eager to return to management? It looks like a hiding to nothing.
“This is what I love doing the most,” he says. “I love the day-to-day. I love the challenge. People say, ‘You don’t need to work,’ but I’m 46 years of age. I love working. It’s not a financial thing. It’s that I enjoy doing it.”
Specifically he loves coaching, “being out on the grass, working with the players” along with his assistants Joe Edwards and Chris Jones . “I knew straight away I wasn’t going to be an old-school overseer who just picks the team on a Friday,” he says. “I knew I wanted to be involved in every little bit.
“As you get more experienced in the game, you realise you have to delegate to people that are better than you at specific things, but I want to be one who’s across the idea and the tactics of the team and how I want to coach. I love it.”
“I’m interested in how the game changes and evolves. We’re seeing it now, I think, in terms of the positional game and the type of game we’re in. When you’re working, you’re in a bubble. When you’re out of a job, it’s a nice chance to look at the way things are evolving, where you think it’s going. I was always downloading and watching games in the wide angle, studying what Bournemouth do with their pressing, Aston Villa and the way they’re changing under Unai Emery, things like that.”
Did you speak to any other coaches? “Yes, dinners with different coaches and different groups of people,” he says. “I had a few of those, which are a really great opportunity just to mix ideas and chat. I went to see Thomas Frank at Brentford. He was so open and so interesting.
“About a month before this job came up, I went up to Manchester City to do an interview with Rodri and I got the opportunity to sit down for 45 minutes with Pep (Guardiola), which was amazing. Before I even started coaching, I had a couple of days at City and I was just amazed by his engagement on the training ground with the players. That’s exactly what I want to be, something like that. What’s my version of being in there next to a player, going through everything?”
Did you come away from that Guardiola meeting bursting with ideas, desperate to get back to work? “I think it’s definitely the tactical ideas and concepts, but everyone has their own version of that,” he says. “What I also came away buzzing about was the energy. This was early in the season, and Pep has been there for a long time, and you could just feel this bundle of energy and interaction and love for the game.”
The Coventry job came up a few weeks later. There had been other openings, other possibilities, but this one felt like the right club at the right time — an opportunity to prove himself and to build on the impressive foundations laid by Mark Robins over the previous years.
Lampard prefers the challenges of football management to media work (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)
Lampard was on a sticky wicket, given the popularity of his predecessor.
In just over seven years in charge, Robins led Coventry to promotion from League Two to League One, then to the Championship. They just missed out on promotion to the Premier League in 2023, beaten on penalties by Luton Town in the Championship play-off final. They also reached last season’s FA Cup semi-final, where they were again beaten on penalties, this time by Manchester United after an apparent Coventry winning goal in the final moments of extra time was ruled offside by the VAR.
Among some fans, Lampard’s appointment carried worrying echoes of last season’s events up the road at Birmingham, where his former England team-mate Rooney took over from the popular John Eustace. Rooney brought publicity, but he struggled to win hearts, minds and — crucially — matches and was sacked after less than three months in charge, winning just two out of 15 games and dropping from sixth in the Championship to 20th.
The Lampard experience at Coventry has been the opposite. They were only two points clear of the relegation zone when he took over. Saturday’s victory took them up to fifth. They have won 11 of his first 18 Championship games in charge, but the trend is more impressive than that. After taking 12 points from his first nine games (three wins, three draws, three defeats), it is 24 points from the last nine, the only defeat coming against Leeds United, the Championship’s runaway leaders.
Lampard talks respectfully of the work done by Robins and of the “really strong dressing room” he inherited. The squad includes United States forward Haji Wright, a club-record €9million (£7.4m, $9.3m) signing from Turkish club Antalyaspor, and Japanese winger Tatsuhiro Sakamoto as well as a liberal sprinkling of experienced Championship campaigners, to which Lampard has added midfielder Matt Grimes, a £4million acquisition from Swansea City during the January transfer window.
Mark Robins got Coventry agonisingly close to last season’s FA Cup final (Ian Kington/AFP via Getty Images)
He started out at Coventry playing a back four, but the turnaround in results followed a switch to three at the back. That was not Lampard’s intention when he arrived, but he feels it is important to be willing and able to adapt — providing the fundamental principles stay the same.
“When I started managing, everyone was talking about your philosophy and your idea and it’s like, ‘You must have a philosophy and you must stick with it’,” he says. “I’ve never been quite along that path. What I’ve learned in my job is that your philosophy is one thing, but it has to be based around the players and the team that you walk into.
“I went into Everton, for instance, with a real idea of how I wanted to play. You have an idea from the outside of how a squad is, but you never know until you work with it and you face different challenges, whether it’s injuries or players not being what you think. And from wanting to play one way when I went in there, I realised very quickly there was a different way that was going to help us stay in the Premier League because of what we had.
“It’s a been a similar story here. We were playing really well in a 4-3-3, then we lost (Ephron) Mason-Clark with an injury, which left me with only one experienced winger, and we had to change. If we didn’t change, I don’t think the team would have been as strong. So we changed, adapted and played a back three. Now we’ve gone back to a back four again. So my point is: a modern manager can be adaptable. You can be a modern manager and not just have one set way of playing.”
Saturday afternoon at the Kassam Stadium. Oxford look low on confidence after six games without a win. Coventry take an early lead, midfielder Jack Rudoni meeting Sakamoto’s cross with a diving header (and dislocating his shoulder in the process). Coventry’s supporters are enjoying themselves: “Super, Super Frank, Super Frankie Lampard”.
Coventry look well organised in a 4-3-3. At times, right-back Milan van Ewijk pushes up into midfield and left-back Jake Bidwell shuffles over to make a back three. They are in control, looking likely to make it eight wins out of nine. They are dominating possession and Grimes, at the base of midfield, barely gives the ball away. Lampard, on the touchline, looks composed as half-time arrives with his team 1-0 up.
The second half is a different matter: end-to-end, frantic. Ole Romeny equalises for Oxford, leaving Lampard incredulous that play continues after Liam Kitching appears to be obstructed in the build-up; Coventry bounce back, reclaiming the lead when Mason-Clark outjumps Oxford goalkeeper Jamie Cumming and beats him to a bouncing ball; Oxford captain Elliott Moore equalises after being left in too much space from a corner; Coventry forward Ellis Simms sees a penalty saved and Bidwell crashes the rebound against the crossbar; Sakamoto’s sweet strike proves decisive as Lampard’s team hold on for the three points.
The Coventry players and fans celebrate Tatsuhiro Sakamoto’s winning goal at Oxford (Eddie Keogh/Getty Images)
“A typical Championship game,” Lampard calls it afterwards, disappointed that his team lost control at spells during the second half but delighted by the way they responded after being pegged back twice. “My gut feeling is that three months ago, if a game went like that, we would have lost it, as we did at Portsmouth early on,” he says.
“That is the nature of the Championship, where, although this season seems to have a particularly strong top four (Leeds, Sheffield United, Burnley and Sunderland), the expectation is that every game brings a battle and finding real consistency is elusive. The type of run Coventry are on is not the norm.
“If I’m honest, (the top six) felt a long way when I came in,” he says. “The first few weeks were inconsistent and I didn’t see the place brimming with confidence. Did I see this coming? Not necessarily. Did I have belief in the group? Yes, I felt we could get results if we kept working, but I didn’t think with this consistency this quickly. But we just have to continue. We say the same thing every week: the moment you rest on a good feeling, it becomes difficult in this league.”
But he is happy to enjoy the moment with his players and the supporters. It is unofficially Van Ewijk’s job to lead the celebrations, but very quickly a post-victory ritual has emerged where the fans call for Lampard and he responds with a flurry of fist-pumps. The footage always does well on social media, where numbers tend to be swelled by Chelsea supporters happy to see their former favourite thriving.
For the first time in over 55 years, we have made it eight wins in nine league games.
This team is special. 💫 pic.twitter.com/uObCnC1n16
— Coventry City (@Coventry_City) March 1, 2025
In general, though, Lampard is enjoying life away from the intense spotlight of the Premier League.
Of course, he would prefer to be in the top flight because “it’s at the real cutting edge of the game” and “you want that scrutiny”. “But I read about Chelsea every day, story after story, and I know how surreal it is when you’re in the job because I was that man in that seat,” he says. “To be honest, it’s nice to be able to do your day-to-day job and be able work without the dramatic opinion that follows every result”.
“It just feels like you can work with a bit more consistency. You don’t feel like you have to react too much,” he says. “I like that. I’m quite private. I like just working away, if I’m honest. I’m not saying working in the Championship is easier than working in the Premier League; it’s not. Every job has its challenges — Premier League, Championship, League One, League Two, wherever — and I’m enjoying the different challenge of this.
“And yes, (the relative lack of media interest) might be one benefit in terms of getting on with your job, but I want attention to be on me and the club because that will mean we’re doing well. If we keep working well here, more attention will come, more scrutiny will come. That’s a good thing.”
(Top photo: Eddie Keogh/Getty Images)
