Читать книгу Super Frank - Portrait of a Hero - Douglas Thompson - Страница 15
Оглавление‘Being best mates with Rio Ferdinand helped my son.’
FRANK LAMPARD SENIOR
School was nearly over and young Frank was a supremely ambitious and dedicated member of the Upton Park Academy. In the mid-1990s, Harry Redknapp and Frank Lampard Senior were nourishing a group of young players; Frank Junior was starting to graduate from schoolboy player to contender. There was also Rio Ferdinand, who as a fourteen-year-old would go round to tea at the Lampards, and Trevor Sinclair and Joe Cole were waiting in the wings. It was all bubbling nicely and many said they had England’s best youth team.
The players and the form sped on. Harry and Frank Senior’s West Ham won the FA Youth Cup. Frank Junior, Rio and Joe Cole were seen as pivotal to English football’s future. Joe Cole in those days was anointed as the player who would wear Gazza’s crown, the most exciting prodigy since Paul Gascoigne first fizzed and whizzed huge bursts of energy into Newcastle.
Rio had advertised himself as an attacking midfielder. In the second leg of a Youth Cup final against Chelsea, playing just behind the main striker, he scored one, made two and, though only a schoolboy in a fully fledged youth team, announced his self-belief by successfully taking one of the penalties in the shoot-out.
‘That was when I first realised he was top class,’ recalled his friend Frank Junior adding, ‘He was brilliant that night. From that moment, the question changed from “can he play?” to “where should he play?”’
Frank learned. He watched Rio make the game come to him rather than the other way round, which his father had always told him was one of Bobby Moore’s great, almost perfect, skills.
Martin Peters is a great fan of his former club’s graduates. He predicted Frank and Rio’s breakthroughs before they happened, when they were still both teenagers, ‘I look at the old videos and I’m thinking, Hey, Mooro, what are you doing up there? I’m amazed how far forward he got sometimes. The equalising goal in ’66, Mooro was brought down by Overath well forward for the free-kick.
‘I think Rio can do that once he’s got the confidence. He’s got the quickness of feet; he’s just got to learn to pick and choose the moment and the passes. Bobby wasn’t the quickest, but he was very rarely found out because he read the game better than anyone I ever knew, but that took time. Rio’s not the finished article and, at nineteen, he shouldn’t be thrown in the deep end too early. He has pace and he’s got time on the ball, especially at home.’
Of course, at West Ham in the late 1990s, Harry Redknapp reckoned he had the nucleus of a seriously good football side, with Rio, Joe Cole and Frank Lampard always talked up and compared to Moore, Hurst and Peters, the Class of ’66.
Yet nostalgia doesn’t pay much of a dividend. The point of football is to go forward, not back. That’s where you find the glory. ’Appy ’Arry never produced his crystal ball, but he still predicted that the rest of the magic spell could be cast around that particular talented trio. It was all interesting, but, as with many things in football, just a theory.
What Frank Lampard Junior wanted was action. He got his first full chance of it in August 1996, at the beginning of the season. Then all the talk post-Euro ’96 was about foreign players: spending in the Premier League had swelled to a loudly talked-about and unprecedented £90 million. Nearly a decade later it looks like small change. Then, it emphasised that foreign was best. Or certainly thought to be so.
Harry Redknapp’s West Ham, known as ‘The United Nations’, got a different look with the introduction of old-fashioned East End local boy Frank Lampard for the 17 August 1996 match against Arsenal (which the Gunners won 2–0).
Redknapp admitted at the time, ‘Over the last couple of seasons I have been as responsible as anyone for going abroad to buy players. For me the reason was simple. We couldn’t afford the prices being asked at home for the quality needed. But nothing gives me greater pleasure than seeing one of our lads come up through the ranks and it could be a dream for me if in a few years we could field a team full of locals.
‘The trouble has been that the club which used to pride itself on producing its own players had a barren patch. Last season we saw Danny Williamson make an impact and now young Frank has got his chance. I feel that this will be the first of many, many games at the club for him.
‘He is an outstanding prospect who can go a long way. The same goes for Rio Ferdinand who would have played had Slaven Bilic not declared himself fit. Frank and Rio are the first of a very healthy crop.’
Yet, it was Frank who had spent much of the 1996–97 season on the substitutes’ bench while Rio Ferdinand earned the plaudits. Frank says Rio’s swift advancement inspired him and maybe it did, but surely masochistically. ‘The fact that Rio got so much praise helped me, too. Rio and I went about everywhere together and I didn’t begrudge him a thing. When Rio broke in he got loads of accolades and it was all totally deserved. Maybe that was the little jolt I needed. I saw Rio getting all the praise and getting in the side and I thought, I want that. And I went for it. I pulled my finger out and I came back determined to get my own thing going.’
His father said, ‘Being best mates with Rio helped my son. Ron Greenwood used to talk about professional jealousy and that can be a good thing. Rio reached the height quicker than Frank, but it spurred Frank on. He saw what happened to Rio and he wanted some of it.’
There was family strife as he played passionately to get his own headlines. Frank Junior was struggling to get into the first team. His father had total professional, as opposed to parental, belief in his son. He was pushing for his boy. Harry Redknapp? He had a difficult hand to play. But he knew how strong his hand was and, back in 1996, talked about the two Franks with commendable, utter confidence in his instincts and knowledge. ‘Young Frank is a completely different sort of player. He is a central midfielder and right-footed, whereas his father was a left-footed full-back.
‘I think he is going to be a really good player. He doesn’t give the ball away and has the knack of scoring goals. I don’t expect him to be pushing regularly in the first team until next year, but he has won his chance.
‘Frank certainly hasn’t been shown any favouritism. The senior professionals know if a bloke is good enough and if he wasn’t he would soon be shot down. But senior pros aren’t stupid, they pick who can play a bit and this boy can play. They know he is good. He is six foot, mobile, has a soccer brain and scores goals. He is an exceptional talent. Frank wants to be a player and he will be. I’ve complete faith in him. There’s no favouritism here. I picked Frank because he’s good. It’s as simple as that. I had a similar situation with my son Jamie at Bournemouth. He will be a first-team regular by the start of next season.’
Years on, he said, ‘Frank Lampard my brother-in-law I will love forever. I love the man. Were Frank and Frank being persecuted for being father and son? Not by me. But maybe by circumstances.’
Frank Junior rose above them. In West Ham’s 1997–98 season, he endorsed the faith he had in himself, which was more than enough to convince most other people. He just wanted his chances, like the opening game of the season on 9 August 1997, the hottest day of the year. Frank sizzled, too, against Barnsley.
West Ham had won just once on the opening day of the season in their past ten attempts. It didn’t look any better. As the second half began they were trailing by one goal. Then John Hartson nodded in an equaliser for the Hammers. Frank then scored West Ham’s winner with a quarter of an hour remaining.
He flicked the ball past David Watson thirty seconds after having come on as a substitute. Headline? Phew, what a scorcher! He kept driving forward, but there was no sudden leap to first-team fame. It’s been that way with him: first Rio got the glances and attention and later, in Euro 2004, Wayne Rooney, as Frank moved his game and career up a gear.
He has always been in the business of building dreams, putting down foundations for that climb to the very top. But there were distractions. There were also temptations. And he was only a teenager.
