Frank Lampard says Chelsea can REPEAT Arsenal’s rise to the top

Good morning. We're not practicing your shots over here this morning. Why? We're not practicing your shots on the chamber. No? What makes you think that? No, no, that's what you used to do in the... That was a long time ago, though, trust me. We should be at home putting up shelves like the rest of us on Thanksgiving. I'll be pulling extra hamstring like Jürgen. Okay. Good morning. Happy bank holiday. And... Yeah, are you happy to be here? Lots of smiles. It's nice. Very pleasing. Yeah. We'll begin on the TV with Gary's last question. Hi. No, you give me, if that's alright. Yeah, out for a while still. Yeah, coolly. No, I think it'll be a tight call for the season, to be fair. So, he's working away. A bit impressive of him, actually, as a professional. He's doing his job very well, but unfortunately the injury was a bit of a tough one. Kukurela, probably another two weeks or so. It was a two or three week injury when he first hit it a week or so ago. Mason and Reece, you know. Kai Havertz? Kai Havertz is in contention for the game. He's trained. Anyone else? I just wondered if there's any update at all on what he said regarding Reece Jayne? No. No, same. Same. Is this a game for Over? Given his vintage, his Arsenal vintage? We'll see. I've got Over, I've got Kai, I've got David Fofana. Mostly not going to divulge the team right here, but he's fit and ready. Would the Arsenal connection come into your thoughts at all? Not really, not really. I think it's probably, well, possibly, because we all think sometimes a player going back to their old club gives a certain motivation. I haven't delved into that too much with Ove himself, so I'll pick that position on my feeling of how they've trained and what the team structure looks like. Given the run that the Arsenal have been on, particularly the last game, and this is a cliché question, but that might surprise you from me, is it a good time to play them or are they a win-win? Yeah, I think it could be either way, couldn't it? I think they've got, you know, very much in the hunt still to win the Premier League and a fantastic team who've had a great season. So, if they're wounded slightly, that could give a big reaction. If we can make things difficult for them, then of course that could feel different. So, that one's a hard one to call. You say they're still in the chase. In reality, do you think that they really are still in the shadow of winning the title? Yeah, of course. There's enough games left for them and the Jeopardy! to be there at the top end and the bottom end of the table, I would say. So, I think they're fully in it. I think Manchester City have shown incredible form. I think we all respect that, but I think we also have to respect what Arsenal have done this year and they'll believe they're still in it. And rightly so. It's May Day. Is it going too far to say that Chelsea's the club in distress? Well, we're not in a great moment, are we? I've been able to live this now for a few weeks and I also lived maybe 10 years of incredible success here and saw that continue and was part of it again and then saw it continue. I think it can be pretty normal if you look at the history of all the top clubs in the league, of moments of tough periods. Our opponents tomorrow are a good example of that. They want to be challenging for the Premier League and they are again now. That's been a while for them. So, I think we have to put perspective on it and understand that we've got to try and work on all aspects as a club to get back to the feeling and the position of where we want to be. It's not a given in this league and there's a lot of work to do. I'm not going to ask whether you're happy because you're a winner, so you clearly won't be happy, but you still relish getting up in the morning and coming to the game? Absolutely. I was eyes open when I came into this job. I'm too experienced in football as a player and now as a coach to understand that things don't necessarily change overnight in terms of results and we've seen that. Our job is to work on performance and mentality of the group and training to try and bring back a good feeling. Firstly, a good feeling only comes with hard work, as I say. So, I enjoy that challenge. Again, I was very aware of the challenges coming in and I'm very proud to manage the club. I love being here and I enjoy doing my job. The reality of football is that your career will not be full of successes. People will always remember successes, but part of the job is the tougher moments, whether you're a manager or a player. You can't always control results, but you can control how you work every day, so I enjoy that aspect of it. You said the other day that the players seem about 20% down on confidence. You've just said about the great success you've seen here over the years. Have you ever seen players here addressing them here so low? Well, I think they're low on confidence and they're also low on performance, so I think I shouldn't distinguish that and make it all about confidence. As I keep saying, you can only work to get a level of performance to then bring confidence back. I've been here in periods of the club where the confidence has been low because nobody likes losing games. I had moments here as a player where we dropped our standards as a collective and had to lift it. Fortunately, in those periods, when you look back over history, we managed to get it back through hard work, maybe level of the squad, whatever at the time. We changed manager a lot in some of those periods. It's certainly not one to try and compare generations or eras. It's just different now in terms of the modern player, the squad that we have here and what our expectations are. So, the only thing we can do is consider the moment now and the future as a club and work very hard to get the squad where we want it and also to get the players performing so that that confidence word is not a big word I'm using in my press conference every week because at a club like this, you should work hard on the level of the player. You shouldn't be talking about team confidence, but it's clearly an issue at the minute that needs to be addressed. It only gets stressed with self-responsibility in the first place, throughout the club actually, to then make it better. There was a moment at the end of the Brentford game where, as visiting fans do, they directed some taunting, which I'm sure you weren't aware of, but I thought it was very telling the way the Chelsea fans, as one, in a bad moment, they all essentially leapt to your defence, started singing your name and so on. I wonder, even though you're clearly not enjoying the results and things, how much you've enjoyed that connection again? Yeah, I've enjoyed it and that's very normal. I expect that from Brentford fans in a moment of good feeling for them. I've said before and after the game, what a great story they've been in the Premier League, so I certainly won't moan about that. I think they probably were just reminded by the Chelsea fans that this club's had a lot of success in the last 20 years and they're probably trying to work to their version of success. Obviously the Brentford game was at home, the game before against Real was at home. I wonder how close, even though this next game is away, how close the first 60 minutes against Real is sort of a framework for what you could do at Arsenal? I think every game is different and gives different challenges tactically, so that will be different. But in terms of togetherness of a group that are connected on the pitch, the first 60 minutes against Madrid was very, very good other than the last bit. So we have to try and find that last bit as well, but we have to be connected and show the same motivation through the team and energy because Arsenal are a fantastic team with very good players and a great team ethic and that's what makes great teams. So we have to match that as a start, as we did with Madrid in that period, to try and get a result. Just finally for me, there's talk that because against City, Arsenal will perhaps struggle a bit in the middle of the field, Jorginho might come from one of your memories of working with him. I like Jorginho, he's a very, very good player and was part of the team that went on to win the Champions League and a central figure in it. I think good personality and interest in them to drive the team, a good player. And if he plays, he's just another good player in that squad and that's the options that teams that are challenging for titles have. So sometimes you can change a player and not drop the level or in fact bring a different type of player in and if that happens, then it's obviously something we've just got to deal with. Arsenal made a massive lead in performance this season with the youngest team in the league. Having had a bit of time to work with this squad now, particularly the younger players in the squad, do you see the core of the group grow together over time and eventually reach that level as well? I think it's interesting to compare the Arsenal story because we all had a little insight into Arsenal, the Amazon series and I think when you see what they're producing now and myself as a football person, the interesting thing about watching the series and maybe seeing before that I went up against Mikel when I was a Chelsea manager in that first year was that there's a long process to sometimes get to where you want to get to. And if I remember playing against Mikel's teams in that early stage which were sometimes five at the back, sometimes four, sometimes they build them at four and then they defend them at five and all these things. And now they have a very, very clear identity and they have a clear, through recruitment, change of squad, pretty much team completely other than maybe the players that have come through and obviously you always need academy players to come through at a higher level when they've had that. But there's been a lot of work to that through Mikel, through the team, through alignment, through good recruitment. And if we talk about it as just happening this season and it's come overnight, I think you have to go back to the beginning and all those tougher periods. So I think do we have the possibility to do that? Yes. Will it take a lot of time and good decisions along the way? Absolutely, yes, that you can get there. But of course those things have been probably a credit to Arsenal because I saw and you remember the times when the manager was being questioned quite a few times, the owners were being questioned, the players were being questioned. And that process can take two or three years, which it has done. And within that two or three years you've got to make a lot of right decisions and keep working in a good way. And to be fair from a coaching side, I think it's a great thing to see a club stick with a manager when maybe at another club they may have changed manager two or three times. I think they're a great example of that done well and part of the answer as to where they are now. As I say, alongside very good coaching and good players.