Lampard is content to leave it to outsiders to cast their judgement on what the Blues should be aspiring to achieve this season. He is concentrating his focus on improving the individual and the collective, with the main target gelling his freshened-up squad as quickly as possible.
‘The pressure on me to do better than last season should be standard, regardless of anything,’ noted Lampard today at his first pre-match press conference of the season. ‘That comes with the territory of this job.
‘I understand there will be a lot of talk about the players we’ve brought in, and we were very joined up on the business we wanted to do to improve the team. We’ve done it hopefully in a good way. We should be excited, but we should also have a slight word of caution that we need to work with the new players to get them settled into the team and get the team working as well as possible.
‘Other people can talk about us challenging or not. In the last two seasons we have a finished a lot of points behind Liverpool and Manchester City, so we have to first look at closing the gap and build confidence by getting the team working well together. I’m not jumping ahead and making any predictions on us.
‘I know what it takes to win Premier Leagues,’ added Lampard. ‘When you look at the teams who have dominated in recent years, they are a story that has run over a few years in terms of recruitment, coaching and improvement on the training pitch that translates to the pitch. It’s not a simple story that bringing in players must win the league, it doesn’t work that way.
‘I hope we will improve, I know expectations will be there and I won’t hide away from those, but we won’t jump ahead of ourselves.’
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