2022/23 Frank Lampard

[John from Bootle]

You think we’re finishing 7th? Personally I don’t think expectations like that are realistic or fair on Lampard. I think we need to nip that in the bud right now, it isn’t helpful and will harm us down the line.

Might be boring, but, get to 40 pts asap, and then take it from there. Only target this season is to improve.

 

[Davekknowsnothing]

He’s doing a good job this season so far with let’s face it a squad with too many players not being good enough quality

 

[JLW]

You think we’re finishing 7th? Personally I don’t think expectations like that are realistic or fair on Lampard. I think we need to nip that in the bud right now, it isn’t helpful and will harm us down the line.

Like ive said many times over half of this league is average to poor, i fully believe we can get top 10 and maybe a little higher with a bit of luck.
People need to get last season out there heads like its the norm, its not it was a freak season as in injuries, numerous VAR decisions, and the worst manager in our history driving us into oblivion.

Right now with the manager and squad we have we are easily in the 10 teams in the division so why cant we achieve it?

We know longer have to field JJK Godfrey at FB no Keane gifting goals galore, Gomes contributing zero.
We don't have to rely on Holgate every week.

 

[Marius57]

Like ive said many times over half of this league is average to poor, i fully believe we can get top 10 and maybe a little higher with a bit of luck.
People need to get last season out there heads like its the norm, its not it was a freak season as in injuries, numerous VAR decisions, and the worst manager in our history driving us into oblivion.

Right now with the manager and squad we have we are easily in the 10 teams in the division so why cant we achieve it?

We know longer have to field JJK Godfrey at FB no Keane gifting goals galore, Gomes contributing zero.
We don't have to rely on Holgate every week.

Right now, we are literally 11th.

I'd be happy to finish top 12 personally. One injury and we do have to field Keane at CB. The drop off from our starting 11 is huge.

 

[JLW]

Right now, we are literally 11th.

I'd be happy to finish top 12 personally. One injury and we do have to field Keane at CB. The drop off from our starting 11 is huge.

Yes after playing the first 5 games without a striker, now we have one and one returning hopefully very soon.

 

[Houghty19]

Garth Crooks:
"Everton are still some way from becoming a top-six side but anything less will see Lampard fighting to retain his job."

?????
Can't we just have a normal media reaction for once?

To be fair Garth crooks is a bit of a bell

 

[blulouie]

To be fair Garth crooks is a bit of a bell

His opinions are totally irrelevant.

 

[BornBlue76]

I feel Lampard has it spot on.. our target is getting solidity (tick), cohesiveness and then add the flair. We aren't chasing a league position and for me I genuinely am not looking at things like Europe this season. Its about the team and building that identity. I do get sucked in of course and I can't pretend I don't look at the table and benchmark our position.. I've even played the if only game where we could be on 16 points. But using my head, and not my heart, I just want to see us win enough games to keep a nice big gap from the bottom three and with a bit of luck push back into the top 10.

 

[Northeastblue]

Mind-blowing that Crooks gets paid for that utter mince.

 

[JLW]

I feel Lampard has it spot on.. our target is getting solidity (tick), cohesiveness and then add the flair. We aren't chasing a league position and for me I genuinely am not looking at things like Europe this season. Its about the team and building that identity. I do get sucked in of course and I can't pretend I don't look at the table and benchmark our position.. I've even played the if only game where we could be on 16 points. But using my head, and not my heart, I just want to see us win enough games to keep a nice big gap from the bottom three and with a bit of luck push back into the top 10.

Also we have a team now going into every game believing we can win it, last season every game we went into trying to avoid defeat.
This isnt the same club as last season far from it, still a long way to go and a few more changes are needed but we are heading in the right direction with Lampard and Thelwell.

 

[JLW]

Mind-blowing that Crooks gets paid for that utter mince.

He is on par with Mark Lawrenson as being a complete 'kin idiot.
Its beggars belief that they actually played football with some of their views on the game.

 

[Papa Shango]

It’s quite easy to see why they come out with this crap, media absolutely despise us because we’ve dared to try to break their “big 6” before and failed to do so. Happens to every team that’s done it and sustained any sort of pressure, problem is no other team has been “7th best” as consistently as us over the last 30 years.

The media have their darlings that they know will generate revenue for them, you know who doesn’t, the likes of us, Leicester, West Ham etc. They want to paint us as unrealistic in wanting top 6 so by the end of the season they can say Lampard under achieved no matter what he does.

It’s also no secret that Lampard is the black sheep of the 3 great England midfielders over the last 20 years with Scholes and Gerrard, that bias has very clearly continued into his management career too. Both were better than Gerrard by a distance in all metrics, it’s can be argued either way if Scholes or Lampard were better but Gerrard and Liverpool were the darlings so he was always put into the conversation, same thing happening with them as managers now. Gerrard had one decent season in management, winning a two horse race when Celtic downed tools under Neil Lennon and that’s seen as some sort of achievement yet Lampard in his first season got to the play off final, in a tougher league and then under a transfer ban took Chelsea to the Champions League where they went on to win it next year when no one gave them a chance of it at all.

The British sports media may genuinely be the worst in the world because of their intense and obvious bias towards some individuals and clubs. The simple fact of it is Lampard will always be a failure of a manager in their eyes, unless he goes back to Chelsea and wins the league, much like how Richarlison was a dirty diving cheat when he played here but now that he’s at Spurs he’s industrious, hard working and a good goal scorer.

It’s no wonder when “journalists” like this are out there, as well as many others, that the rise of fan channels and dredge like TalkSport has become so popular, at least if you listen to things like that you’re either getting something you know from the outset is biased in fan channels or in TalkSport you’re getting the opinions, as braindead as they may be, from people who played the game and also wear their biases on their sleeve.

All this may very well be true but it's not the case with Garth Crooks.

Garth Crooks say idiotic stuff because Garth Crooks is actually an idiot.

 

[davek]

He's a win over United away from having the papers and hacks who were burying him last season falling over themselves to interview him about his 'secret' in turning Everton around.

 

[toffeeblue9]

Signs of progress everywhere and it's v encouraging that we appear to have a defensive unit which doesn't wilt under pressure

However, my big concern is that we are doing too much defending - Pickford has been in brilliant form, but he's saved 5 more shots than any other keeper in the league (and played a game fewer than a good number of them). We've made the most blocks, tackles, clearances etc - this is all great, but it says to me that we aren't keeping the ball enough to stop inviting that sort of pressure.

I think we are beating our xGA by 6 or something at the moment, which is great but I'm not sure that sort of consistent outperformance is possible, so we need to get better at actually keeping the ball and not inviting the sort of pressure which is leading to these amazing defensive stats

Having said that, it's early days - we have an an entirely new defensive unit and an entirely new midfield (of the 7 players in those units, only one of them has been here longer than 10 months), so miracles probably shouldn't be expected straight away.

The other problem, of course, is that we don't really look like scoring much. That's not been too much of a problem while we've been keeping goals out, but there will come a time where we need more

 

[Westend Blue]

You think we’re finishing 7th? Personally I don’t think expectations like that are realistic or fair on Lampard. I think we need to nip that in the bud right now, it isn’t helpful and will harm us down the line.

I wouldn’t call it expected I think we will finish 10th or so the league is really tight I wouldn’t be surprised if we nipped 7th