Who is the real Frank Lampard? A ‘true gent’ ready to give Chelsea his all Those who have watched Lampard grow up reflect on his relentless determination and say they’re certain he can prove the doubters wrong again

Goals make gold coins, Frank Lampard thinks, recalling a conversation he once had a quarter of a century ago with an old team-mate.

He is sat in a posh restaurant in central London and the memory sparks when he spots a familiar face, a couple of tables across, which reminds him of a once familiar phrase. He pauses his conversation, puts down his knife and fork and strolls over. He has a smile spread across his face.

Eating at the table he approaches is Martin Allen, a fan favourite at West Ham when Lampard first arrived at the club as a 15-year-old, tagging along with his dad, Frank Senior, their first-team coach.

After Lampard progressed enough to join the first-team for training games and drills, Allen approached him in the cafeteria one afternoon to share some words of wisdom. “Don’t ever forget, Frank, goals make gold coins,” he said. “My dad always said to me: for you to make money as a midfielder you’ve got to score goals, if you score goals you’ll make gold. And the next season I scored 14.”

Lampard reaches the table, he points at Allen. “Martin,” he says, “don’t forget: goals make gold coins. I’ve never forgotten that!” They burst into laughter.

‘He deserves everything he’s got’

One of the first questions levelled at Lampard when he faced a room packed with media at his unveiling press conference as Chelsea’s new manager, two weeks after his 41st birthday and with only a year in management at Championship Derby County on his CV, was if he really is experienced enough for one of English football’s biggest jobs. If he is not too young for the role. If it had not come too soon.

Lampard was expecting it, he said.

Yet for those who have known the former midfielder since he was that teenager at West Ham through to becoming one of Chelsea and England’s greatest midfielders, Lampard has already grown accustomed to proving people wrong: too young, too slow, too fat, too poor at football to make it as a player.

“If you could’ve had an attitude of hard work, dedication and professionalism, and to earn the right to be a footballer, and have a career like he has done, that man deserves every bit of everything he’s got,” Allen tells i. “Those who doubt him don’t know what he’s like.”

‘A mirror of his dad’

Frank Lampard Snr was a promising full-back growing up, but was told he was too slow to make it. Undeterred, he decided he would simply get faster. So he bought a pair of running spikes and every day after training he would set up a grid and embark on “Doggies”. Doggies involved marking out increments of five yards, then practising bursting sprints: five yards and back, 10 yards and back, 15 yards and back, 20 yards and back, 15 yards and back, 10 yards and back, five yards and back, with 15-second breaks in-between.

Lampard Snr went on to play more than 500 games for West Ham and made two appearances for England, so it had not done him any harm. But by the time he was a West Ham coach and recommending it to the first-team players, they were already giving him odd looks and telling him that times had moved on.

Undeterred, when Lampard Snr realised that his teenage son was far too slow for a footballer he bought him a pair of running spikes and began marking out the grid. “He was a mirror of his dad,” Allen says. “Because his dad was there, at times if we were short of a player he would come and join in. At the time, he wasn’t great, he was a little bit overweight, he wasn’t as quick as you needed to be.

“But in the afternoons when we came out to the car park after lunch to go home, his son would be doing Doggies back on the training pitch, and practising striking the ball over and over again. Every day. Often on his own.”

‘You could never keep up with him’

It is a memory which also sticks out for Joe Cole, who was four years below Lampard at West Ham but would spend much of his career as his team-mate, from Chelsea to England. “I remember seeing him get quicker and quicker, and better with his feet as the years went by,” Cole says. “Everything you see from Frank was developed through his mentality and ambition to become the player he was.”

What Lampard may have lacked in acceleration in the early days, he made up for in stamina, an attribute that would define his career. Even at 15, when he would first come along to training with dad during the school holidays, Lampard could keep up with the best of them.

Some afternoons the players would travel to Hainault Forest for a cross-country run. When Lampard Jnr, looking slightly podgy at this point, joined in nobody was expecting him to even compete with the scholars, who were aged 16 to 18, let alone the seniors. Peter Butler and Allen (so he says) tended to win it each time, but that afternoon Allen, out front, looked back over his shoulder a few miles into the five-mile route and was astounded to see the 15-year-old just behind. “He finished fourth,” Allen remembers. “The scholars were miles back.”

Cole adds: “Whenever we did pre-season runs at West Ham or Chelsea — or anywhere — I’d always try to keep up with him and you never could. He drove players around him, he set the standards in everything. That’s my abiding memory of Frank: constantly training, a real drive and focus that was admirable, that was installed in him by his dad and his family.”

“At 15 none of us thought he was that good,” Allen adds. “None of us. He was good, but not that good. But Harry Redknapp — who was the manager then — stood in front of us all and said then, ‘One day this boy will play for England.’”

‘Like a raging bull’

Bertie Brayley was a youth team-mate of Joe Cole’s at West Ham. He was such a highly rated striker that Lampard Snr would let him join in extra training sessions with his son during the run to the Youth Cup final, which they won in 1999. One versus one attacking and defending, dribbling at speed and turning on Frank Snr’s whistle, sit ups, press ups, dynamic stretches on the move. Brayley remembers once cheekily rainbow-flicking the ball over Lampard’s head but then skying the ball over the crossbar when he was one-on-one with the goalkeeper with Lampard “on me like a raging bull”.

Spotting an undoubted talent in Brayley, Lampard Jnr began encouraging and helping him. He even invited Brayley round to his mum and dad’s house in Gidea Park for breakfast. “Patricia’s breakfast was great!” Brayley recalls.

The extra tuition helped Brayley score a series of goals during the Youth Cup that year, including a hat-trick in the two-legged final. Even when he missed a penalty in the first leg, he turned his phone on in the changing room afterwards and Lampard Jnr was the first person to have sent a message.

Brayley now runs his own one-to-one football coaching sessions with kids, called Tek Lab 121, and many of the drills are inspired by his time with the Lampards.

‘He is first class’

So there is more behind the idea to bring Lampard back to Chelsea as manager with one of his primary tasks transitioning the brightest buds of the academy into the senior team, than simply a transfer ban and little choice else. He has a genuine passion for helping young people to learn and improve, from the “Frankie’s Magic Football” series of football books he began authoring three years ago to get children reading — he is a big reader himself — to the time he always spent with the youth teams wherever he went.

At West Ham “he would take time to speak to the youth lads and have some light-hearted banter in the canteen before training and head to the ball court for a stretch and little games,” Brayley remembers. “He was and is first class towards people.”

Even on days off for the first-team he would turn up at the training ground, join in with a game of keep-ball with the younger age groups, have a jog and a stretch. “On first-team match days you would see him on a Saturday morning and he would watch a bit of our game as we kicked off early, before heading off to Upton Park to play,” Brayley says. “If he was away with England and arrived back in the UK at ridiculous hours you would see him in doing a bit the next day.”

Much like with the gold coins, Lampard does not forget, either. When Brayley took his eldest son to watch Lampard play against West Ham for Manchester City they met in the players’ lounge after the game and Lampard gave Brayley’s son, Bobby, Samir Nasri’s signed shirt. “Frank is a true gent and I wish him all the best managing Chelsea.”

‘Frank is unremovable’

Lampard is in a Munich hotel at the players’ party celebrating lifting the 2012 Champions League trophy when he is handed a smartphone at 1am and asked to speak to the person on the other end of the line. It is David Johnstone, editor of the popular cfcuk fanzine who has known Lampard since he signed for the club in 2001. Johnstone asks if he can come and Lampard gives him the address and tells him to jump in a taxi.

Lampard is at the door when Johnstone arrives and talks his way past the bouncers. The party is as phenomenal as would be expected. By 5am they are on top of the building by the rooftop swimming pool. As manager Roberto Di Matteo walks past, Didier Drogba pushes him in. Di Matteo hangs on and drags Drogba in, too. The next minute, Ryan Bertrand and Gary Cahill are jumping in fully-clothed, still wearing their medals.

Johnstone has one of the nights of his life, and manages to hitch a lift with a group of fans who have hired a private jet to make it back in time for the parade the next day. The players are shocked to see Johnstone has made it in time. A little later, Johnstone is speaking to Lampard, thanking him for the invite, when Lampard turns to him and says: “I wish they could all have a bit of that.”

“He doesn’t like leaving anyone without a photo or any autograph,” Johnstone says. “He’s the same mould as Joe Cole and John Terry. He’s got his feet on the ground. Frank told me he wanted to have a pint with them all.”

He has tried, too. Back in Lampard’s playing days he could often be found having a drink in the King’s Head or The Pig’s Ear (the pub he owns) after matches at Stamford Bridge, and would buy supporters drinks and happily talk football with them.

It is no accident that he is so adored by Chelsea supporters; it is not only that he was such a key player during such a hugely successful period for the club, or that he ended his career as Chelsea’s top scorer, from midfield.

Many players share similar outlandish successes at other clubs yet do not garner the same level of almost cult-like following that Lampard has at Chelsea. “Chelsea now have put themselves in a position where Frank Lampard is unremovable,” Johnstone says.

To succeed, he will require a mixture of goals and gold coins, and everything else he has learnt during his career.