Everton manager Frank Lampard made some damning comments about his squad after their F.A Cup defeat to Crystal Palace.
As a young coach, he will know that modern football encompasses rather a lot of factors. You have tactics, nutrition, data analytics, sports science, video analysis, psychology, business acumen, emotional intelligence, even neuroscience and politics.
It’s a dizzying tapestry of incredibly involved disciplines that must coalesce in order to succeed at an elite level.
However, according to Frank Lampard, his players lost 4 – 0 on Sunday because they lack ‘bollocks’. To be fair to Frank Lampard, he was speaking in the heat of the moment.
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As well as that, resolve is absolutely a necessary quality in a Premier League footballer. Still, his comments are concerning. At best, his remark that he doesn’t have a ‘magic wand’ suggests that he lacks the interpersonal skills to manage multiple people.
At worst, it’s the same reductive attitude that has held English football back for years. Lampard is only 43 years old and in a managerial context, he is considered young. Yet he espouses the dated notion that football games are won purely by toughness, by embodying manliness, by suffering silently. By having bollocks.
Another well endowed young manager is Steven Gerrard of Aston Villa, who offered no sympathy towards Arsenal winger Bukayo Saka who many, including Saka himself, feel is the target of excessive aggression on the pitch.
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Gerrard said that he has screws in his hips after a playing career in which he had 16 operations and that he now struggles to go to the gym.
He is only 41. There is absolutely no reason why a 41 year old ex athlete who has had access to the best medical care and all the money in the world should be struggling to exercise. Unless he spent two decades being kicked all over the place. Rather than seeing his situation as part of the problem, his attitude seems to be that if people hurt him, other people ought to get hurt as well.
Lampard and Gerrard have attained their positions perhaps too quickly due to the trendiness of the modern, suave young coach. Far from modern, they are proving themselves to be a copy and paste of traditional British begrudgery. What a load of bollocks.
