When the substitutes’ board was raised in the 83rd minute at the King Power Stadium to show Ross Barkley coming on for Tammy Abraham, recent Chelsea history suggested Frank Lampard had picked a key moment in a key match against Premier League top-four rivals to send a political message.



It was a day that had summed up the problems that drove Chelsea’s fraught and ultimately failed striker search throughout January. After a litany of missed first-half chances from Abraham, Callum Hudson-Odoi and Mason Mount, only Antonio Rudiger’s first Premier League goals for 15 months prevented Leicester from handing Lampard’s men a ninth loss of the season.



This late substitution wasn’t quite Jose Mourinho deploying Andre Schurrle as a false 9 at Old Trafford in 2013 while publicly pursuing Manchester United striker Wayne Rooney, or Antonio Conte pointedly handing an unfit Barkley his Chelsea debut in a Carabao Cup semi-final against Arsenal in 2018 to...