Frank Lampard accused his Everton players of lacking “the bollocks” to perform at the required level after a flaccid performance ended in a 4-0 FA Cup quarter-final defeat by an excellent Crystal Palace.
Everton faded alarmingly after conceding the opening goal after 25 minutes, and Lampard queried whether confidence alone was the issue. “There is only so much you can keep trying to butter someone up to get confidence,” the manager said. “You’re playing at the cut-throat end of football; this is the FA Cup quarter-finals. If you haven’t got the confidence to play, you can flip it and say: ‘Have you got the bollocks to play?’ Apologies but that’s the football term.
“We didn’t play that badly today, Palace didn’t play that well. It was a lack of confidence, and a lack of what I just said. It wasn’t tactics. Palace couldn’t get out of their half in the first 20 minutes.”
Asked about the difficulty of altering that dynamic, Lampard seemed fatalistic, and keen also to point the finger of blame at those who preceded him in the job. “It’s a challenge because it’s been there quite a long time before I got here. I don’t have a magic wand to get inside people’s heads and change the resilience across a whole squad. That’s a work in progress. So we just have to work on that, as frustrating as it is for me and for the 4,000 fans who travelled down.”
Lampard saw other possible explanations for his team’s showing, not least the demands of playing so soon after Thursday evening.
“Two things hindered us. One was the scheduling. The reality is we could have played at three or four o’clock but the broadcasters want to show other games. There’s Allan’s suspension, which didn’t help us.”
He was, though, adamant that defeat at Palace should have no effect on the battle to stay in the Premier League. “It should be nothing. Every time we win people talk about momentum, every time we lose people talk about damage done. In reality we need to be bigger and stronger than that.”
