Frank Lampard praise is premature after Chelsea’s flaws exposed again

Amid all the praise Frank Lampard receives for fairly basic feats at a major club, Chelsea still have some major flaws, that really should have been cleared up by now.

Perhaps the starkest one was the manner of Andriy Yarmolenko’s match-winning strike for West Ham United.

It was exactly the kind of breakaway goal that Chelsea were conceding on the opening day of the season. It’s still happening.

Chelsea still badly struggle to defend. Yarmolenko inflicted the 44th goal they’ve conceded this season, which is their second worst record after 32 games in the Premier League after conceding 47 in 1996-97.

Twelve of those have been from set-pieces. Chelsea still badly struggle to defend those in particular.

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They still lack a coherence in attack. There’s a certain raggedness to the side. Sure, they can be brilliant when already winning or allowed to counter at pace, but a sloppiness can appear when there’s pressure. It speaks volumes that Willian is again the second top scorer. Tammy Abraham is without a goal in nine games.

“Sloppiness”, meanwhile, is precisely the word to describe some of Kepa Arrizabalaga’s displays.

Lampard, for his part, would instantly solve that by replacing the goalkeeper if he could – now that he is able to sign players having endured a transfer ban upon taking over.

Along those lines, the manager has already made good decisions, with a handful of them masterstrokes.

There has been clear progress with this side, but there have also been problems that other managers would have been criticised for.

There have certainly been numbers other managers have been criticised for.

After 32 games, Lampard’s Chelsea have two points less than the club did at the same stage of the 2011-12 season shared by Andre Villas-Boas and Roberto Di Matteo, while they have amassed nine less than last season under Maurizio Sarri. They have also lost the same amount of games – 10 – as in the notorious “Jose Mourinho season” of 2015-16.

It could be fairly argued that these are Chelsea’s least favourable circumstances since then, following the transfer ban and the absence of players of the stature of Didier Drogba and Eden Hazard.

On the other side, Lampard had broken through initial issues to prove the quality of this team, so the early-season caveats and excuses don’t really play. There’s also the common argument this is one of the weakest Champions League chases in years.

Leicester City are free-falling… yet still in third.

Chelsea squandered the opportunity to go ahead of them on Wednesday, and are still in some danger of squandering a chance to go straight back into the Champions League.

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There is still real suspense to this season for them, and it sometimes feels that’s unnecessarily the case. Chelsea make self-inflicted errors.

They certainly squandered the advantage wrought from beating Manchester City, by losing to a West Ham United side that were so struggling for goals, and wins.

It should be stressed that none of this is to overly criticise Lampard, or say his job should be in question, or anything like that. He may well prove himself to be one of the greats.

But just as we shouldn’t go overboard with such defeats, we shouldn’t go over the top with some of his wins.

Results like this merely remind that he might have got the job prematurely, and that his managerial career is shorter than the playing career of many of his young talents.

Lampard still has a fair bit to learn himself, not least how to solve these lingering problems in his team. He is, at the least, aware of all this.

“It’s a sign of where we are,” Lampard said after the game. “We have a lot of hard work to do to get to where we want to be.”

They may need to bring in a top – and tall – centre-half. They certainly need more cohesion. They need to cut out some basic errors, before getting quite basic praise.