Simon Jordan backs Frank Lampard to see out season with Everton, but questions decision to hire him
Simon Jordan thinks Everton took a big risk hiring Frank Lampard to begin with and he must now ‘dig in’ to keep them in the Premier League.
The Toffees have won just two Premier League games since he took over in January, and currently have a three point gap between themselves and the bottom three but with a horrible run of fixtures to come.
Now Jordan, who was speaking to talkSPORT and answering fan questions, believes that the club maybe rushed into the decision to bring him in to begin with and says there is no way they can fire him and thinks they could survive simply because three teams are worse than them.
“Taking on the Everton role I was reticent, because while you only gain experience how do you become experienced in relegation battles? By being involved in them,” he said.
“That’s fine if the framework of the club is right, but the managerial appointment has been wrong. Everything is right, the sporting director, the resources behind the scenes are right – at Everton that’s not the case.
“So you’re taking somebody who has very little experience of the challenging end of football, i.e. the battle to survive end, and putting them in amongst a group of dysfunctional players that are dispirited and demoralised, and not good enough, and trying to get a song out of them.
“Now Frank has got some results there, obviously the capitulation against Crystal Palace on Sunday was quite brutal in terms of what you saw from Everton because for 15/20 minutes they were in the game and for the next 70 minutes after Palace scored they had no resistance.
“There’s no way you can take Frank Lampard out now, you put him in there. There’s X amount of games. There’s enough juice in Everton to get past the problem they’ve got, but it’s going to be nip and tuck and it might simply be that the three sides beneath them are just simply so poor that Everton get away by default.
“But I do think it was a risk for Everton. I do think they should’ve paused, looked at it more, maybe put Duncan Ferguson in place for a month to give themselves opportunity to get some heart and feeling into the club. But they haven’t, so Frank’s got to dig in.”
Accountability
Jordan has never been one to hold his tongue or go with the flow or whatever the public narrative is, and he’s right here.
Lampard was a huge risk as an appointment and because we were only halfway through the season and with the squad available to him, many just assumed that the fortunes would turn around.
That’s been far from the case though and fans are rightly genuinely worried about the future of the club now. Lampard hasn’t been what many thought he would, and Jordan has been consistent in his thought process about that.
His lack of experience at this level is certainly a bit of an issue and has proven to be a bigger obstacle to overcome than many anticipated.
He has time to turn it around and it will not be easy, but the club have no choice but to let him ride out the rest of the season and give it his all before re-evaluating the situation in the summer.
In other Everton news, ‘Odd move’ – Sky Sports pundit names Everton man as ‘worst’ signing of the season