What Are The United Lads Saying To Lampard?

The England national team take on USA tonight for a friendly match staged at Wembley Stadium. The event will see the reunion of the English United and Chelsea players who battled it out in the European Cup final a week ago today.

This meeting could have been extremely painful for our lads if the result hadn’t gone our way. Nobody likes losing, but players like Wayne Rooney and Rio Ferdinand seem to struggle more than most with the idea of defeat. Whilst training with the likes of John Terry, Frank Lampard and Joe Cole would have been great inspiration for improvement next season, not wanting to have the disappointment rubbed in their faces again, I certainly am chuffed that our lads are the ones that get to be gracious today, rather than bitter in defeat.

Following the Cup final, Frank Lampard bitterly claimed that the best team did not win.

“We deserved to win,” he claimed. “Nobody could deny we didn’t. We completely dominated the game and created countless chances. The best team didn’t win.”

Over the course of the two hour match, United forced 4 saves from Petr Cech, obviously not including the chance that gave us the goal, to make it a total of 5 shots on target. In stark contrast to this, Chelsea just had 1 shot on target, from which they scored a goal, after the ball deflected cruelly off not one, but two United defenders, before an Edwin Van der Sar slip on the wet grass left Lampard with a simple tap in.

Over the course of the two hour match, United were in possession of the ball 56% of the time, in comparison to Chelsea’s 44%. We had a territorial advantage of 52.5% to Chelsea’s 47.5%. We had a passing success of 80% to Chelsea’s 71%. The only area where Chelsea proved to dominate, like Lampard claims, is with off target shot. Chelsea had a go but failed to hit the target an incredible 18 times.

So today, as the players meet for training, what do you think our lads have to say to Lampard?