Manchester City vs Southampton: Frank Lampard shuns the limelight ahead of his Premier League farewell
Lampard didn't get the emotional farewell at Chelsea that Gerrard did at Anfield, but he will choose his own way to say goodbye to Manchester City
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Your support makes all the difference.There is more than one way to say goodbye. Compared to the fanfares that accompanied Steven Gerrard's departure from Anfield, Frank Lampard's will be more akin to John Arlott's last words on the radio: "And after Trevor Bailey, it will be Christopher Martin-Jenkins."
Restrained, matter of fact and without fuss. A final match for Manchester City, where unlike Liverpool tickets will not be changing hands for £1,300, a lap of the Etihad Stadium and then, like Gerrard, America. One to the Eastern Seaboard with New York City, the other to California.
“I would have liked to have left Chelsea with a home game to say goodbye but I didn’t get that. I was told I was leaving the week after the last home game,” said Lampard, recalling how football can be routinely cruel even to a man who had scored more goals for his club than any other.
“I didn’t need a complete fanfare. My fanfare was looking back on victories like winning the European Cup in Munich and winning the league at Bolton. These are the things that stick in my head.”
One of the things that nagged away at Gerrard was that he did not take Jose Mourinho’s offer to join him at Real Madrid. Lampard, too, was offered abroad by Mourinho and on the surface he would have been better equipped to take it. Learning a foreign language, which made Gerrard so uneasy, would have given Lampard, whose children are half-Spanish, few problems.
“I had ideas when I was younger to take that challenge on,” he said. “The only realistic one was Inter Milan when Jose Mourinho was there. I decided against it and I am pleased that I did because with my longevity at Chelsea, I won more trophies – the European Cup, the Europa League, another title, personal stuff.
“I had thought about Inter because the offer came at a difficult stage in my life – I’d lost my mum the year before – but it was the right choice to stay.”
Staying gave Lampard the European Cup. It was not quite Gerrard’s Miracle of Istanbul but it was a match when Bayern Munich pushed Chelsea relentlessly back. There seemed only one plausible result.
“We had tried so hard for so many years to win it and, from the quarter-finals onwards, we won it in the craziest way in one of my worst seasons.
“I had a phase when I felt on top of my game for a few years and nothing can break you – you don’t even have to think, you just play.
“Then you get past 30 and after every bad game people write you off and managers come in and start looking to the future. From the age of 32 to 33 it became a different career for me and, funnily enough, they were probably my most successful years, winning the Champions League and Europa League, breaking the Chelsea goalscoring record.
“All those things happened under Villas-Boas or Benitez, managers who weren’t picking me regularly.
“I think I am finishing at a pretty good time. I think it is going to get even more physical, even more technical, probably. Any young English boy, who wants to come in can’t think they have made it just because they have broken into the first team at 20.”
Lampard was 17 when he made his debut for West Ham. Unlike Gerrard, he was born into the footballing aristocracy, his father, Frank, played 551 times for West Ham, his uncle was Harry Redknapp. But like Gerrard there was a determination to squeeze his talent dry.
“There has to be DNA, there has to be talent from the beginning,” he said. “But for any young player my emphasis would be on hard work.
“We all think, at 20, we know everything. Even at 28 I thought completely differently to how I do at 36. You have to listen and work, particularly in the modern game because it is getting tougher.
“I think you have to give an element of freedom to those in their teens and early 20s and see what happens but then the onus is on you to learn and change.
“There is a journey off the pitch that we all have. The modern world is more set on celebrity, on how much money you can make. We shouldn’t jump to conclusions about young men’s behaviour. There are hurdles in life and you don’t always jump them cleanly.”
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