Frank Lampard has insisted that ‘hard work brings confidence’ as Chelsea look to turn results around this season.
Chelsea have lost five consecutive games in all competitions since Lampard’s return to the club as interim manager and are 12th in the Premier League table.
Lampard’s side travel to face title-chasing Arsenal in a London derby on Tuesday evening and the interim boss has discussed his demands from his squad. The 44-year-old believes the foundation for improving results is hard work on both the pitch and training ground.
“Our job is to look at performances and mentality in training to try and bring back a good feeling. That only comes with hard work,” Lampard told his pre-match press conference.
“I enjoy that challenge and I was very aware of it coming in. I’m very proud to manage the club, I love being here and doing my job. As footballers, your career will not always be full of success; people remember the success, but the tougher moments are part of the job as a manager and a player. You can’t always control the results, but you can work every day.”
Lampard believes Chelsea are ‘low on confidence and performance’ after their winless run and called on his squad to revert back to basic principles in a bid to turn things around.
“They are low on confidence and performance. I shouldn’t distinguish that and make it all about confidence.
“You can only work to get a level of performance to bring confidence back. I’ve been here in moments where confidence has been low because nobody likes losing games. I had moments as a player where we dropped our standards as a collective and we had to lift it. Looking through history, we managed to get it back through hard work, the level of the squad, whatever.
“It is different now; in terms of the type of player and the squad we have here and what expectations are. We can only consider the future and work really hard to get the squad where we want it.”
