If you’re looking for a good place to start when talking about Frank Lampard’s career, a 1996 West Ham fans forum might not be an obvious one.
But really, it’s the perfect beginning. The video’s pretty famous by now – a teenage Lampard sits alongside his uncle Harry Redknapp as the then Hammers boss fields questions from the club’s fans.
One fan lays into Lampard – who doesn’t believe he’s good enough, and thinks his place in the side isn’t warranted over the likes of other youth products like Scott Canham.
Redknapp told the fan that Lampard would go on to be a Premier League great – someone who could go on to win it all.
At the time, it may have smacked of preferential treatment – a manager giving his young nephew a chance at the big time when there were other more talented players sitting and waiting in the wings.
But now 21 years later, Frank Lampard is retiring as a man who has won everything it is possible to win at the pinnacle of the English game. Scott Canham, with no disrespect to him, never played a Premier League fixture, and ended his career a decade ago playing for Thurrock.
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The thing with Lampard is that he was never going to be as dazzling as some of the other great midfielders to grace the Premier League – he didn’t go on mazy 50-yard runs like Ryan Giggs or regularly hit pinpoint-accurate cross-field balls like Steven Gerrard.
But what he did better – far better – than either of them, or any other midfielder in Premier League history for that matter, was goals.
The stats alone are ridiculous – 177 Premier League goals, the fourth-most of all time behind just Alan Shearer, Wayne Rooney and Andy Cole.
And 102 Premier League assists to boot – that’s second only to Giggs. He scored or created 279 Premier League goals all in all, and what’s more than that, so many were vital ones.
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When Chelsea were in need of a goal, it was so often Frank who would pop up to provide it. It was a Lampard brace that handed them their first league title in 50 years against Bolton back in 2005.
There are too many moments to keep picking them out, but he scored massive Champions League goals against Barcelona, Liverpool and Napoli to name a few.
It was also Lampard who robbed Lionel Messi on the halfway-line and who lofted the ball forward for Ramires to run on and lob Victor Valdes on one of Chelsea’s greatest ever nights – a 2-2 draw in the Nou Camp when John Terry had been sent off and their European dream looked dead.
And it was Lampard who captained Chelsea to victory on their very greatest night in Munich. There was no way he was going to miss from the penalty spot that night either.
Image: Alex Livesey / Getty
Wow! pic.twitter.com/GeIt5pZslt
— Dante (@VtorDante) July 20, 2015
He won it all at Chelsea – three Premier Leagues, four FA Cups, two League Cups, the Europa League and the Champions League.
For a while it looked as if he might add a fourth Premier League title with Manchester City – he even popped up with one of his trademark vital goals to earn them a draw against Chelsea. Secretly, he was probably a little bit happy that it was his old club, not his new one, that went on to lift the trophy that year.
There is no doubt he retires as a Chelsea legend – he may even be their greatest ever player – but he will go down as a Premier League legend too.
They may never be a midfielder quite like him in the Premier League again – one with such an impossible eye for goal and who is so, so much more than the sum of his parts.
And maybe that’s why we can excuse that West Ham fan who rubbished him 21 years ago – to the casual viewer who’d only seen short glimpses of this 18-year-old running round on the pitch, there was no reason to believe he’d ever go on to become a Premier League legend.
But to someone who really knew him – to someone like his uncle – there was no doubt he was going to become exactly that. Twenty-one years later, I think we can probably agree that Harry was right.
