Everton may have dodged £30m Mykhailo Mudryk bullet as Frank Lampard flops at Chelsea
Take your mind back to last summer when Frank Lampard was the manager of Everton and many fans believed he was the right man to take the club forward.
The England and Chelsea legend spent decent money during his one summer window as boss, bringing in all of Amadou Onana, James Garner, Conor Coady, James Tarkowski, Ruben Vinagre, Neal Maupay and Dwight McNeil to the squad.
But one player he made a bid for and failed to sign was Ukrainian star Mykhailo Mudryk, whom Everton made a £30m bid for during the window but saw it rejected by Shakhtar Donetsk.
Fast forward to today and not only are Lampard and Mudryk both not at Goodison Park with Everton, but they are now both at Chelsea.
Mudryk signed for the Londoners in a startling £88.5m deal in January, while Lampard returned to Stamford Bridge in an interim role after being sacked at Everton in February.
But with Lampard having been at the club for five games now, he has endured a torrid time in the dugout in west London and has shown that it was probably a good thing Everton were unsuccessful in their bid to sign Mudryk last summer.
Since taking over at Chelsea Lampard has lost all four games as manager, scoring just once in that run – a deflected Conor Gallagher strike against Brighton.
But what’s more is the way he has used Mudryk, a player he was so desperate to sign earlier this season for a different team.
The 22-year-old featured in just three of those four games, and started only one of them. He didn’t feature at all in the first leg of the Champions League defeat to Real Madrid. He completed 90 minutes against Brighton, but just 22 minutes in each of the games with Wolves and the second leg of the Real Madrid tie.
He was credited with the assist for the lone goal scored under Lampard’s management at Chelsea so far, but his performances haven’t been great and Everton may have dodged a huge bullet.
If Lampard can’t get him to shine alongside talent that are far better than what would have been there at Everton, then surely he would have flopped here too?
Everton don’t have the money to spend £30m on a player for him to not be an instant success, so it seems as though Shakhtar did us a favour on this occasion.