Frank Lampard: Big Game Bottler

On Tuesday night, as their European dreams were coming to an end in their own backyard, Chelsea were crying out for its go-to man, Frank Lampard, to take charge. Crying out for anything really. A defence-splitting pass. A penetrating run into the box. A long range shot.  (Did Lampard even take a single free kick the entire game?) But like so many of his teammates, Frank went missing for most of the match. Some might assume that it was Frank’s old mentor, Inter coach Jose Mourinho, who had cooked up a strategic noose that rendered the England midfielder so completely ineffective. Yet the truth is, Lampard has been anonymous for most of the season.

A quick glance at Lampard’s statistics this season won’t reveal much cause for concern…

Lampard has found the back of the net 12 times in 27 league games, which already equals his output for the whole of last season and puts him near the top of this season’s scoring charts. But the numbers don’t tell quite the whole story. Half of those goals have come from the penalty spot – and apart from a brace against Manchester City during Chelsea’s biggest loss of the season, none of them have come against the big teams. No Arsenal. No Manchester United. No Tottenham. No Liverpool. No Aston Villa. Instead, Lampard’s scalps read like a tour of the clubs that prop up the bottom of the table – Sunderland, Blackburn, Bolton, West Ham, and Portsmouth.

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