It’s different though when you can see a team carrying out a managers tactics but they’re just not working. Like Chelsea under Sarri or Brighton at times under Potter. You know they are doing what the manager is telling them but it’s just not working. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the players carrying out the instructions though.
At Everton I have grace reservations that the players are doing what the manager tells them to do. That’s the difference for me. It’s why I’m reluctant to blame managers after Koeman. I just see players making loads of individual errors, struggling to keep up work rate, being unbelievably sloppy in possession, ballooning crosses and set pieces, and not concentrating in set piece defence. No manager would train any of those things so all that can be judged from that is that the players are either not very good and can’t implement what a manager wants, or just refuse to implement what a manager wants.
I'm not knocking Lampard, i'm just saying that in 90% of cases at all clubs what he's saying will be true. There's a plan on how to win the game and the players show flashes of being able to do it, but then for whatever reason it doesn't always work out on the pitch.
One of the main reasons for us - in my opinion - is that the players have spent a long time being told they can't be trusted to do things and they should take the easy option etc, and now they're being asked to play proper football. They ARE capable of it (to what level is debatable, but they are) but when things start to go against them they revert to type and start taking the easy option again. I know we all love to claim these are the worst collection of professional footballers there's ever been and not one of them has any redeeming features (apart from St Anthony, obviously) but the fact that we keep changing managers and asking them to do different things and play in different positions etc is clearly going to have an effect on their confidence and belief.
The Leeds, Brentford and City games have shown what the players can do when they're confident and believe in what they're doing, but they're understandably pretty brittle after the run of results they've had and so when things aren't going to plan the plan seems to go out of the window and they get ragged.