Premier League Hall of Famer, club legend and bang average gaffer

When Frank Lampard was spotted at Stamford Bridge on Tuesday watching Chelsea and Liverpool play out a game that resembled 22 drunks indiscriminately swinging haymakers at each other in a pub car park, only a couple of hacks put two and two together and came up with four. Whether these gentlemen of the press were genuinely “in the know”, or engaging in the kind of ludicrous speculation that earned them the tsunami of ridicule that arrived soon after they published stories announcing Lampard’s possible return to the Chelsea helm on an interim basis, they have every right to feel extremely smug on Thursday.

Rumours that Chelsea were likely to “give it Lamps til end of t’season” grew more legs on Wednesday than a chorus line of Riverdancing millipedes and on Thursday afternoon the inevitable news was finally confirmed. “Chelsea FC has announced that Frank Lampard has been named Caretaker Manager until the end of the season,” honked a club statement issued by Stamford Bridge circus ringmasters Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali. “As we continue our thorough and exhaustive process for a permanent head coach, we want to provide the club and our fans with a clear and stable plan for the remainder of the season. We want to give ourselves every chance of success and Frank has all of the characteristics and qualities we need to drive us to the finish line.”

Given Lampard’s record of previous albeit not entirely abject failure in charge of the club, followed by a far less successful stint overseeing an Everton side he left swirling around the Premier League plughole, Chelsea’s decision to replace Graham Potter with somebody who is demonstrably worse at managing a football club seems completely bonkers, even by the standards of the