After all they went through; on Mark Robins, Coventry City and... Frank Lampard?
If the new owner of Coventry City is looking to undo some of the goodwill he got from buying the club, he's going the right way about it.
It all feels like a huge risk, this.
When Mark Robins was surprisingly sacked by Coventry City three weeks ago there was considerable surprise. Sure enough, Coventry hadn’t had a particularly strong start to the season. They were in 17th place in the Championship, a substantial fall on last season’s final position of 9th. But surely Robins of all people had some credit in the bank… didn’t he?
Well, apparently not, and now the club are set to appoint a replacement who has become, whether he likes it or not, the poster boy for football’s own version of nepo babies, the one and only Frank “Frank” Lampard, last seen scuttling away from Goodison Park with his tail between his legs in January 2023 as Everton sunk towards a rather all-too-familiar scrap to avoid relegation.
Robins, it rather feels, had reason to feel aggrieved. After all, this isn’t just any old Coventry City manager. This one has history. He was first hired by the club in 2012, and was praised for his handling of the team under extremely difficult circumstances of the chaotic goings-on behind the scenes at the then League One club. When he was tempted away by Huddersfield Town after just five months, it was difficult to blame him. A couple of weeks after his departure, the club was placed under a transfer embargo. Three weeks later, they collapsed into administration.
By the time of his return four years later, a lot of water had passed under the bridge. Robins and Huddersfield hadn’t worked out. They avoided relegation from the Championship on the last day of the 2012/13 season and finished 17th the following season. He left the club after the first game of the 2014/15 season. Three months later he was appointed at Scunthorpe, and they ended that season in 16th place in League One. He was sacked in January 2016.
Things didn’t go any better for Coventry either, really. They finished the 2012/13 season in 15th place in League One after being deducted their mandatory ten points for that administration whoopsie. The following season they finished 18th, having left The Ricoh Arena to play at Northampton and received another ten point deduction. In 2017, they were relegated into League Two.
Robins returned to the club in April 2017 with the drop looming again. It may even be fair to say that this decision was one which did more to save the club than any other taken over a wretched few years for the club. Within weeks of returning to the club, he’d taken them to the Football League Trophy at Wembley. It was a valedictory win as relegation into the bottom tier of the Football League for the first time since the late 1950s beckoned.
What happened over the following years revitalised the club in the way that it had been crying out for. Promotion back was achieved the difficult way, scraping into the League Two play-offs in sixth place before beating Lincoln City over two legs and then Exeter City at Wembley to book a swift return to League One.
After narrowly missing out on a place in the League One play-offs by finishing 8th in 2019, they raced to the League One title in 2020 and have been in the Championship ever since, reaching the play-offs two seasons ago. Again, this came against a background of turmoil, with the club’s owners moving them out of the city of Coventry for a second time, this time to play at Birmingham City’s St Andrews for two years between 2019 and 2021.
The club’s odious ownership hedge fund finally sold up and left last year. It had taken Coventry City an awfully long time to start being a normal football club again. Doug King is a local businessman, and it’s reasonable to say that his decision to buy the club was a popular one. But if he was looking to tarnish that reputation, getting rid of Robins in the way that he did certainly feels like a good way to go about it.
With two promotions and a trophy win at Wembley, there’s a case for saying that Mark Robins is now the club’s second most successful ever manager after the late Jimmy Hill. But the manner in which this all happened, part of the way through the season and as a result of a bit of a dip in form as though he was just another Johnny Come Lately, left something of a sour taste in the mouth. It doesn’t seem reasonable to suggest that Robins should have had enough credit at the club to be given until the end of this season to stabilise the team again. And all this was done in order to clear the way for… *checks notes*… ah. Okay.
What is there in the previous managerial record of Frank Lampard that seems to have so impressed the owners of Coventry City that they should just completely clear the decks for him? There’s nothing to say that Lampard is a hilariously terrible manager. His record over spells with Derby County, Chelsea and Everton was hardly stellar.
He failed to get Derby into the Premier League despite an almost club-breaking amount of money having been spent on it by an owner who’d taken leave of his senses. At Chelsea, he kicked off with a 4-0 defeat at Manchester United and was eventually sacked in February 2021. His arrival at Everton saw them just about do enough to avoid relegation in 2022, only for him to get sacked with that trapdoor creaking open again.
But because football is a game in which reputation will get you a lot of chances and a considerable amount of grace, he was back at Chelsea on a temporary basis before the end of the 2022/23 season. His return to Stamford Bridge in April 2023 resulted in a first bottom-half finish since 1996 and a record low tally of points and goals scored in the Premier League era. His win record of 9% is the worst of any Chelsea manager who has taken control of the club for more than three games.
So again, what is there in the record of Frank Lampard which makes him a better candidate to manage Coventry City than the man who’d been in position there for years and who knew the club inside out? Lampard has previous Championship managerial experience, but that was more than half a decade ago and didn’t end in success. He may have reached the play-offs with the Rams, but the expectation at Pride Park at that time had been promotion.
There was a time when it felt as though Mark Robins was the only glue even holding Coventry City together, and supporters were fulsome in their tributes to him when the announcement of his departure was made, once the initial shock had worn off. We all know that football is only sentimental when it suits the bottom line to be so, but it still left something of a sour taste in the mouth that somebody so instrumental in guiding the club through such turbulent times should be jettisoned in this way.
And for what? Frank Lampard is now 46 years old. He certainly can’t be considered some sort of hot managerial prodigy any more. Getting rid of Robins didn’t give the team any sort of bounce. They’ve picked up two points from three matches since he left and remain in 17th place in the table. If or when this announcement is made, Lampard is going to have to come good on whatever promises have been made of improvement on the pitch, and all this in a division which can be notoriously savage and harsh at the best of times.
And these are not the best of times for Coventry City at the moment. They’re only two points above the relegation places and have only won four of their seventeen league games so far this season. It’s a big gamble with plenty of scope to go wrong. Whether Frank Lampard is the right man for this job, only time will truly tell. It’s just that there isn’t that much in his previous managerial record to suggest that he will be, all of which means that this may be a slightly tense winter in Coventry now, when it really didn’t need to be. Supporters will be hoping that King has got this gamble right. The club can’t really afford for him to have failed to do so.
Attached image courtesy of Wiki Commons licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence.