DAVID BECKHAM is out of sight but not out of Frank Lampard’s mind. Conscious of how the former England captain overcame his World Cup despair in 1998, the Chelsea player is determined to forget his own summer of discontent by finding new levels of excellence on the pitch.
As a leading member of the “golden generation”, Lampard’s struggle for form symbolised England’s underachievement in Germany. But, having come through periods in which he has been affected by criticism since the finals, he has insisted he is thinking only positively, stirred by the memory of Beckham’s recovery.
“You’d be a fool to think you can go through your career without any blips,” Lampard said yesterday at the launch of Totally Frank, his autobiography. “You have to understand that and you have to come through strongly. That’s what made David Beckham the player he was when he came back from the World Cup [in 1998] after being sent off. I’ve come out determined. I feel really hungry for the season. You can’t get your head down.”
Lampard said that he felt relief at scoring, albeit via a deflected shot, in England’s 4-0 win over Greece on Wednesday evening. “It was an important game for me,” he said. “At the World Cup, I had a lot of opportunities to score and I know more than anyone else that I should have scored a few goals. If I had done, it would have been a completely different story.”
He noted the lucky nature of the goal against Greece, wryly. “That was the sort of goal I would have died for at the World Cup and it comes in a friendly just after it,” he said. “The longer you go without scoring for England — it would have been six games without scoring — the worse I would have felt about it.”
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An extension of his scoring drought might also have increased the pressure because of his status as a goalscoring midfield player. “When you have a burden of scoring goals, you take a bit of stick if you don’t score. I’ve had it [criticism] at certain times. Sometimes it gets on your mind. We don’t walk around with our eyes shut.
“There are days when maybe you think negatively about it. The only way you react is to think positively and to think this is part of being a footballer. I could have hidden away in the World Cup and not kept trying to get forward and score goals, but I didn’t. That’s the attitude I’ll take now.”