IAN HERBERT: Todd Boehly has spent 11 months exploding Chelsea and stripping away its core

You can usually rely on Frank Lampard to deliver when these moments arise.

No obvious embarrassment to be in another Chelsea tracksuit on Thursday, emblazoned with his own initials.

Deftly dealing with the idea Raheem Sterling once put forward on Newsnight that “your Frank Lampards” get every chance in management and “your Sol Campbells don’t.”

Lampard is used to appearing at press conferences to introduce himself and questions of legitimacy are nothing new.

But there was no escaping the fact that this was his second at Stamford Bridge in less than four years. And that it was only possible because three months ago he was deemed unable to fend off relegation at Everton.

It comes just two years after he was sacked after his first spell as club leader

Under Sean Dyche on Monday, Everton secured a 1-1 draw after going a man down and a goal behind against Tottenham Hotspur. Those who know Everton best will tell you that under Lampard they would have lost that game. Of course, ‘your Sean Dyches’ generally don’t get these gigs either.

That’s the madness of modern Chelsea. Todd Boehly has spent 11 months blowing up the club and taking away the intellectual core, from the technical director to the groundsmen, and Lampard is the human shield he now protects himself with.

“I wanted to give the club and our fans a clear and stable plan for the rest of the season,” Boehly said in the statement announcing Lampard’s return. Fans previously hoped for “a clear and stable plan” for the medium to long term, but it seems that something needs to be done for the 51 days between now and the end of the season.

Boehly will need all the ambassadors he can find among Chelsea’s old boys as the fortune he has made makes the team the fifth best in London. And given that the challenges on the horizon include where to tell the club’s supporters where they will be decamped to, while turning Stamford Bridge into a 21st century stadium.

The investment bankers who supplied Chelsea with Boehly and his Clearlake Capital consortium eleven months ago always knew that rebuilding was the trickiest part of the challenge.

Chelsea face some tough decisions about how to keep their stadium up to date

The best solution is to demolish and rebuild into a 55,000-seater. Clearing the rubble would take 12-18 months and the entire project five years.

Where can you play in the meantime? Craven Cottage (capacity 30,000)? Far from Wembley? No choice will be appetizing. Boehly could have used some credit in the back before tackling this.

The advice to customers of at least one of the financial institutions that have helped US buyers find British clubs in recent years is to be careful about the history of these venerable sporting institutions. “You are only guards,” their people say.

But Boehly has done invaluable damage to the reputation of such buyers by the way he has torn the club apart, like a manic gamer in Football Manager.

Those looking for some optimism about Lampard, the sequel can stick to the way Mason Mount, Reece James, Fikayo Tomori and Tammy Abraham flourished under his tutelage when the club was under a transfer embargo four years ago.

That embargo brought him the best of days. It wasn’t until the tap was turned back on that things got more complicated. It’s gushing now. Lampard’s legacy is a diametrically opposed reality to that golden autumn of 2019 when the children he inspired held hope.

Todd Boehly has exploded Chelsea and wiped out their intellectual core in 11 months

Chelsea’s last nine games look formidable, but there’s less pressure on Lampard

Chelsea’s last nine Premier League games look formidable. They have all four of the best games to play. Less busy for Lampard in some ways, but still busy nonetheless. With games against Manchester City and Newcastle rounding out the season, he needs a good return from this month if Boehly’s first season doesn’t want to be an even bigger car crash.

At his inaugural press conference at Derby five years ago, Lampard conjured up a list of the club’s former 1970s players who needed just a little help with ‘Colin Todd’. This time he talked about Chelsea being ‘my club’, despite them having sacked him once.

“For me, it’s not about unfinished business,” he said. That sounds a little Hollywood. I just want to work and help as much as possible.’

A little Hollywood is exactly what Boehly wanted, although the bookies saw an opportunity. One of them had a 14/1 chance on Thursday night that Lampard would be sacked before the end of the season.