Graeme Souness: Frank Lampard’s Everton job far harder than Steven Gerrard’s at Aston Villa

Although they were often compared as players, Steven Gerrard’s situation at Aston Villa is much healthier than Frank Lampard’s at Everton, writes GRAEME SOUNESS.

Aston Villa manager Steven Gerrard. The Liverpool icon has found himself in a good situation at the Birmingham EPL club. Picture: Neville Williams/Aston Villa FC via Getty Images

Sometimes the right job comes your way at the wrong time as a young manager. That was true for me when I left Rangers for Liverpool in 1991. It wasn’t the right time to take it, but it was too good to turn down.

After a single season at Derby County and defeat in the promotion playoff final, Frank Lampard was offered the chance to manage Chelsea. It was his dream job, but came too early in his managerial career. He’d been a great player for Chelsea, although I’m not sure that bought him much more time because Roman Abramovich hired and fired managers so often.

Then Lampard finds himself in the wilderness, wondering what sort of job is going to come along next. Merseyside’s a hotbed of football and Everton have great traditions, a big passionate support, so it was very hard for him to turn them down at the end of January. Was he going to get a better offer? I don’t think so. He had to take it.

Yet Everton are also one of a long list of clubs where the owners have had their trousers taken down by agents. Entrepreneurs take control of a club and think it’s easy, but soon find out that it isn’t. Randy Lerner at Aston Villa, Mel Morris at Derby, Ellis Short at Sunderland, even Abramovich made mistakes, as did Manchester City’s owners initially with signings such as Robinho.

Everton manager Frank Lampard during a Premier League match against Tottenham Hotspur this month. Picture: Sebastian Frej/MB Media/Getty Images

The most important thing at a football club is getting your recruitment right, so the employees who are charged with making those decisions have an enormous responsibility. Nobody gets them all right, but Everton have had a particularly miserable period with their choices since Farhad Moshiri’s takeover six years ago.

After Monday’s 5-0 defeat at Tottenham Hotspur, they are in danger of going down. They have a group of players that should not be near the drop but history is riddled with teams like that, so Lampard has to come up with a system to help his team dig out results.

At this time of the season when relegation is threatening, it’s harder for the big clubs than the likes of Norwich, Burnley or Watford, who are playing with less pressure on them. Everton’s home record is good, and eight of their remaining 13 games are at Goodison Park, but if you keep getting beaten up like they did at Tottenham then that soon bites into your confidence, regardless of where the next game is.

Everton chairman Bill Kenwright and owner Farhad Moshiri. Picture: Jan Kruger/Getty Images

Although they were often compared as players, Steven Gerrard’s situation at Aston Villa is much healthier than Lampard’s at Everton. Villa appear to have good, supportive owners and the structure of the club is right.

They have a squad that suggests they can be successful and success for Villa in the next five years is being in Europe every season and threatening the top four. That’s what they have to be looking at.

I thought it was a good job for whoever took it. It would have been a coveted job for anybody out of work and some people in work, as Gerrard was. It was disappointing for him to leave Rangers but I understood it. He had a good grounding in Scotland, but he’s English and has moved closer to his family.

Although winning one out of nine trophies from three years does not normally keep you in the job at Rangers, he did win the one that mattered most, last season’s league title, to stop Celtic winning ten in a row. I’ve been to several functions in Glasgow over the past few months and Gerrard is still a popular figure up there with most people.

Villa’s squad is good enough to make them a top-eight team. We come back to that word – recruitment. If Gerrard is clever and lucky with that, they can threaten the top four because a club like Villa should be aiming to get into the Champions League.

Steven Gerrard gives instructions to Philippe Coutinho during a Premier League match between Leeds United and Aston Villa at Elland Road this month. Picture: George Wood/Getty Images

Some people already see Gerrard as Jurgen Klopp’s successor at Liverpool in two years’ time but you can’t look that far forward – anything could happen. He might not make the impression he wants to at Villa or Klopp might decide to stay. They say a week is a long time in politics and the same is true in football, so a season is an eternity. Nobody in football can say for sure that “in two years’ time I’ll be doing this and in four years’ time I’ll be doing that”.

Liverpool’s fans would love him to go back at some stage but he has to have a good few years at Villa before that happens. Lampard got his dream job too early at Chelsea, whereas Steven got a good grounding at a big football club at Rangers and dealt with the pressures of that well. Now he’s at another big club where I know, from speaking to former Villa players, that the crowd can quickly get critical.

He needed a job between Rangers and Liverpool, given the way the English game views the Scottish game. It’s different to when I moved directly from Rangers to Liverpool because I had half the England team playing for me at Ibrox, but the world has moved on and Premier League clubs can sign the best players on the planet now. When you start to spend big money, the expectation goes up and that’s when the players and the manager have to perform.

– The Sunday Times

Originally published as Graeme Souness: Frank Lampard’s Everton job far harder than Steven Gerrard’s at Aston Villa