The Coventry City manager has seen his team lose top spot to Monday night’s opponents Middlesbrough after picking up just one point from their last three games in the Championship.
Frank Lampard’s Coventry City have fallen from the top of the Championship table for the first time in four months (Image: Simon Dael/Shutterstock)
At the end of November, Frank Lampard was looking to put a lid on Coventry’s mild euphoria. His team had just defeated Charlton Athletic to move 10 points clear at the top of the Championship standings after 18 games.
Bookmakers did not publish odds on the Sky Blues’ chances of promotion to the Premier League. They were seen as less certain.
Two-and-a-half months later, Lampard’s side must look up to find their next opponent. For the first time in four months, Coventry will start a game from a position other than the top of the mountain. And Lampard faces another new challenge in his managerial career and has great determination to succeed.
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“It’s a big test for all of us to come to terms with this situation mentally,” Lampard said ahead of a strong home fixture against leaders Middlesbrough. “There’s a lot of pressure on us now. The dial has changed. We have to rise to that pressure.
“There’s usually an element of suffering when you try to get where you want to get to. At one point, we had a lot of things going our way, and now we have to show a different side of ourselves. I’ve been in the game too long. I always felt like that was a possibility.”
Coventry have only picked up one point from their last three games thanks to a draw with bottom side Oxford United, while Boro have won six on the spin. But when Lampard speaks to his players ahead of Monday night’s game at the CBS Arena, he will be able to draw on his experience as one of the most famous players in the English game to help them cope with the dramatic turn of fortune.
Frank Lampard and Dion Dublin join Skybet/British Heart Foundation’s Every Minute Matters campaign
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“My job is to make them understand that you have to go through a bit of a tough period to be successful. The year I won the Champions League with Chelsea, the manager changed hands in February and we played away to Napoli 3-1. We were about sixth in the Premier League and I was dropped.”
“There were a lot of things that made me think this year wasn’t going to be the best… but it ended up being my most successful year. It’s a slightly different story, but there are similarities. The only way out of this is to calm down and refocus.”
And Lampard, who took a break from promoting his Every Minute Matters campaign* to look forward to the match against Middlesbrough, admitted he needed to talk to his players about the mental demands as many of them have never been in a situation like this before.
“We don’t…have that feeling of, ‘Oh, we’re up by 10 points and we’re going to beat whoever comes in front of us.’ No, there’s a little bit of a different feel now.”
Middlesbrough have risen to the top of the Championship under manager Kim Helberg (Image: George Wood)
“Do we need to talk about it? Yes, because many of our players have not been part of a promotional campaign in which you were the leader for a period of time.
“There’s a different pressure, the kind of pressure where teams want to beat you. But the boys believe in themselves, and we’ve got to take advantage of that.”
*Frank Lampard is the latest in a line-up of big footballers to learn CPR and encourage fans to ‘Show Your Heart’ for the ‘Every Minute Matters’ campaign launched in 2024 by Sky Bet in partnership with the British Heart Foundation (BHF).
Lampard said: “Football has the incredible ability to influence people, but with that comes responsibility. Knowing CPR is something everyone should have in their locker, it’s easy to learn and it can save lives. This fantastic campaign shows how the game can make a real difference off the pitch.”
The campaign has already inspired more than 460,000 people to start learning life-saving CPR using BHF’s free tool RevivR, and high-profile backers including Mr Lampard, Dion Dublin, Micah Richards, Glenn Hoddle and Sam Allardyce are now aiming to take that figure to the 500,000 mark in February.
Show your heart and learn CPR in just 15 minutes. Search for BHF RevivR or visit revivr.bhf.org.uk.
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