The January transfer window allowed Frank Lampard to finally get the strength in depth that he feels his Coventry City squad needs to push to achieve the club’s ambitions of automatic promotion to the Premier League.
The Sky Blues boss has gone from restricted game changers on his bench – which, on some occasions due to injury, illness and suspensions, included two goalkeepers and untried youngsters making up the numbers – to a wealth of options when everyone is available.
The arrival of Frank Onyeka, loan pair Romain Esse and Min-Hyeok Yang and fellow winger Jahnoah Markelo has swelled the numbers and means that up to five players now miss out completely on the matchday squad each week.
Last weekend was a case in point when Kaine Kesler-Hayden and Min-Hyeok Yang were omitted for the second consecutive teamsheet, while Jahnoah Markelo lost his place among the subs due to Brandon Thomas-Asante’s return from a three match ban. Elsewhere, midfielder Jamie Allen hasn’t been involved for a number of weeks while although full-back Miguel Brau has been injured with a fractured rib, he’s due back in training this week but with little prospect of being included in the matchday 20 unless there are fresh injuries.
Although Lampard has strived and pushed for a stronger 25-man promotion pool, he admits it poses a new selection conundrum for him when naming a strong bench after his starting eleven. Inevitably, that leads to disappointment and frustration from those left out and, in Yang’s case, possibly even from his parent club Tottenham Hotspur.
“It’s one of the hardest parts of a job,” admitted Lampard, who is not the only high profile manager to raise the subject, with Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta arguing that they should be able to name a bigger domestic bench in step with European competitions where clubs are allowed to name up to 12 substitutes.
“I agree with what Arteta said recently, that we should have more spaces on the bench because people are employed by this club to train, to be able to be available to play. And it’s the worst thing you can do to take that right away from someone come the weekend.
You know I’m very, very sympathetic to that and it’s difficult. But the reality is, from my point of view and ours, that any squad that wants to challenge and keep challenging has to have more than the basic line of players because we were starting to feel that. So you can’t have it all ways in my role but I try to be as sympathetic as I can and understand.”
Lampard, however, insists that there’s also an onus on his peripheral players to work hard and fight to show they deserve a place on his nine-man bench, saying: “There’s also the rough edge of it which is that you better train out there to try and show that you need to be in the squad. And that’s what it is.
“But I think it’s something that we really should look at, the squad that we put in for the season because all of those players should be, for me, available to be on the bench.”
Lampard is not, however, holding his breath over it, adding: “They changed some rules in football but I’m not sure they’ll listen to me.
But I think if you’re talking about awareness of players, their well-being and their way and how they are, to allow them to train all week and then not be used for the club that’s employing them, and they’re an employee and they want to play and be involved, to come off the bench… It’s a lot to take that away and I think that should change at some point
One of Lampard’s many strengths is his man management but he admits he simply doesn’t have the time sit down with every disappointed player left out every time.
“I can’t do that every week because otherwise I’d have nine subs, including a goalkeeper plus maybe now three or four and I’d have to have like a revolving door in my office every Friday,” he said, “so it would be quite tough.
The players have to understand that I can’t speak every week and there should be an unspoken thing that you had better train out there, and if you don’t there’s sometimes a simple answer to why you’re not in the squad.
“But I also, at times, of course have to make that decision to chat to a player, whether it’s me or a member of my staff to speak to them and communicate it at some point. So it’s a two way thing, my communication a bit, but they communicate by how they train on the pitch.”
Loan players can provide an added complication. Asked if there is sometimes an obligational or a pressure from the parent club to give their player a certain amount of game time of number of match minutes, Lampard admitted: “I think sometimes there is, yeah.”
