Lampard, privilege and a seamless segue from Everton to Big Cup

Sport is often held up as the world’s sole bastion of meritocracy, and with fair reason: how good at it you are is right there for everyone to see, your performances visible to the world and your quality not a matter of opinion but a matter of fact, described by simple, infallible metrics. And then you consider Frank Lampard’s managerial career – a more egregious example of privilege you could not wish to see, as Barry Davies might’ve put it.

Lampard is no stranger to such accusations, and not just because he’s a privately educated, Trump-appreciating Tory – when he was 17, Harry Redknapp was publicly harangued, in front of him, for preferring his nephew to Scott Canham. Yes, that’s the Scott Canham. In fairness to Lampard, he turned out to be a useful player – useful enough and conventional enough to be handed a managerial job he’d done little to earn other than be good at football. Then, after dragging Derby all the way from sixth to sixth, he was appointed by Chelsea, inspiring them from the depths of third to the heady heights of fourth, before being dismissed midway through his second season.

If any club was going to be compelled by this litany of triumph, Everton were going to be compelled by this litany of triumph, and they duly installed Lampard before handing him a decent January wedge to help stave off relegation. Two months later, they sit fourth-bottom of the table having lost five of their last six league games, and tonight visit third-bottom Burnley for what promises to be a match of devastating incompetence – The Fiver cannot wait.

One thing The Fiver has always wondered, though, is how Lampard responded when Chelsea became Big Cup champions just months after he left: did he think ‘lucky they fired me’,