Some love Frank Lampard. Some hate him.
Some think he is overrated, overweight and over the hill. Others believe he is a national treasure, a footballer who comes around once a generation and one who still has a part to play at the highest level.
Some think Chelsea would be mad to get rid of him when his contract runs out at the end of the season. You cannot get away from it. Lampard polarises opinions.
Yet any football manager wondering whether Lampard still possesses desire and ambition only needed to observe his body language as he was brought off the substitutes’ bench with 19 minutes to go in Chelsea’s 2-0 home defeat against Swansea in the first leg of the Capital One Cup semi-final.
The eagerness with which he wrenched off his tracksuit. The manner in which he took to the field, barking orders, pointing instructions, injecting life and purpose.
This was not a thirty-something working his ticket, winding down on a fat salary while resting on the nostalgia of three Premier League titles and a Champions League trophy during his 12 years at Stamford Bridge.
This was a man up for the fight. A player for whom the prospect of defeat still hurt. A man desperate to prove he still retained the talent which has seen him draw level with Kerry Dixon on the all-time goalscoring list for Chelsea with 193 goals. A man in search of a challenge.
None of which means Chelsea will offer him a new contract. Lampard will be 35 in June. His salary is reported to be in excess of STG150,000 ($A230,000) a week and with Chelsea intent on conforming to new financial fair play regulations you can see why the bean counters might have ticked his name in the Stamford Bridge out-tray.
That is football’s new playing field and it comes at a time when Chelsea have announced their first-ever annual profits under owner Roman Abramovich and when they have been overtaken by Manchester City as the Premier League’s biggest spenders on salaries.
Chelsea can be criticised for many things, but they cannot be condemned for attempting to apply prudence and economic reality to an Abramovich reign, which has seen the frittering of fortunes on whims such as the signing of misfit striker Andriy Shevchenko and which reached a zenith of squander with the STG50 million signing of Fernando Torres.
In pure accounting terms the anticipated departures of Lampard and Ashley Cole in the summer make economic sense. Do they make footballing sense?
Not in Lampard’s case. In Lampard Chelsea have a player who scored 20 goals or more in five successive seasons from 2005-06. He scored 16 last season and has hit the net seven times in 18 appearances so far this term. Compare that record with Spanish playmaker Andres Iniesta, who has never scored more than nine goals in a season for Barcelona and has three in 20 so far this season.
Even more pointedly, compare it with Italy midfielder Andrea Pirlo, who will be 34 in May, the same age as Lampard, and in 12 years with AC Milan and Juventus has never scored more than nine goals in a season.
In fact, in that time Pirlo has scored 48 goals in 466 matches compared with Lampard’s 193 in 578.
In terms of midfield firepower, Lampard has no peer. No wonder the Chelsea faithful keep chanting ‘Sign him up’ and why Pirlo was quoted in the Italian press this week as saying: “They would be mad to let him leave Chelsea; he’s still one of the best in the world.”
Football is all about change and constant rejuvenation but when you have consistent firepower and valuable experience sometimes it is wiser to hold on to what you have for as long as possible, as Sir Alex Ferguson has done with 39-year-old Ryan Giggs and 38-year-old Paul Scholes at Manchester United.
It might not suit the bean counters, but Chelsea should do the same with Lampard.
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Great Britain’s women footballers were a delight at the London Olympics, playing with verve under head coach Hope Powell and drawing a crowd of 70,584 at Wembley for their win against Brazil.
They put women’s football on the map and England’s team are probably worth more than the STG18,000 each they have been offered by the FA in the latest round of central contracts.
But is that figure – STG3000 less than a nurse’s starting salary by the way – really as “embarrassing” as players’ union boss Gordon Taylor makes out when many Women’s Super League games attract attendances in the low hundreds and many of the women players have second jobs?
Taylor has dismissed the FA offer, arguing that the top England men can earn that in a day.
They can and more. Isn’t that what is truly embarrassing about modern football?