How Frank Lampard helped redefine the attacking midfield role in the Premier League

Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho’s whinging about lack of proper strikers this season seemed perfectly logical. After all, despite recently faddish moves toward withdrawn forwards, false tens and inverted wingers, the standard 4-2-3-1 still comes with a ‘1’, and in most clubs that ‘1’ is expected to score goals.

This is decidedly ironic, or perhaps it’s Mourinho’s way of acknowledging there is only one Frank Lampard. That’s because a very quick glance at Mourinho’s first, championship season with Chelsea in 2004-05 reveals that Lampard was the club’s top league scorer with 13 goals, one more goal Eidur Gudjohnsen and three more than Didier Drogba. Lampard was also Chelsea's top scorer in all competitions.

Okay, but what about his non penalty goals per 90 minute tally? Well even here Lamps comes off well that season, with an NPG90 of 0.26 which, for a midfield player, is pretty good (though paled in comparison to Drogba’s 0.55).

Lampard would be the club’s top scorer again in 2005-06 when Chelsea picked up their second league title. He would fall to second the season after, scoring 11 goals (incidentally the team came in 2nd). After several seasons, the novelty of a midfield player scoring the most goals gradually wore off. Today, in the era of Ronaldo and Bale, we'd think nothing of it.

Frank Lampard, who surely had hand in this subtle transformation, announced late yesterday he’s leaving Chelsea. At 35 years old, he’s expected to announce a move to New York City FC to run down his career in MLS.

Lampard will certainly go down as one of Chelsea’s best ever players, if not the best. He should also go down alongside Steven Gerrard as an icon of English football’s dynamic shift from the comparatively rigid 4-4-2 in which midfielders could be generals but not artillery.

He wasn’t a ‘withdrawn 10’ or any such nonsense, but a midfielder with a penchant for scoring, predating Cristiano Ronaldo and the return of the modern winger. His presence in the Chelsea midfield helped provide the illusion of an all out attack, with Claude Makelele pulling the strings.

For England, he could was the source of perpetual joke, the fulcrum of a faux debate over his ability to play alongside his non-doppelganger in Steven Gerrard. It wasn’t his fault the so-called “golden generation” didn’t develop along more convenient lines.

For the Premier League however, Lampard is irreplaceable, no matter the smiley faced analyses in several of the papers this morning of his likely replacement in Cesc Fabregas. But the idea of Lampard—a midfielder with as much attacking threat as the dude in front of him—will remain in his wake.