Frank Lampard’s Coventry City will not only survive their first Premier League season — they will finish fifteenth or higher because Lampard has strangled every Romantic instinct in his football DNA and replaced it with something far more venomous: survival arithmetic. This is the editorial that the purists will hate, and it is precisely why the Sky Blues may succeed where better coaches, with better players, have crashed through the trapdoor. The paradox of the promoted club is that you cannot play like a small team and scrape your way to permanence; you must play smaller than you are. Lampard understands that the Premier League is not a football competition anymore — it is a financial attrition test — and he has adapted his entire managerial identity to pass the exam.
I watched them grind past West Ham back in September