Believe me! I’m just a midfielder!

In my opinion, this was Lampard’s best ever goal for Chelsea. I have considered the skill, the difficulty, the opposition, the situation of the match and the pressure/significance of the match.

I have seen many replays of this goal. Everytime I see it, I’m amazed at Lampard’s concentration and composure. He misses the lob from Makelele but he was unfazed. He goes onto chase the ball till the line and finds himself in an acute angle. He is still unfazed. And then he controls the ball and positions it and makes a well-calculated lob-shoot from the tightest of angles beating an excellent goalkeeper. That was exquisite skill and sublime finshing by Lampard for a breath-taking goal.

On this super-strike, Lamps said:

Sometimes I do it as a bit of fun, but it is a test of your skill and I practise shooting from all angles and with both feet. Sometimes it is horrible when you are missing the target all the time but you get your reward if you work hard.

Millions of times I have done that and missed the target and then it comes good. The first touch let me down so I suppose that is what made the goal because that is what gave me the angle.

When I scored, I didn’t really have any other option than to clip it over the goalkeeper. I had to get the right trajectory and it was a great feeling when it dropped in.

I’ve given some excerpts from various sources on this super goal from Lampard:

FC Barcelona website

Lampard turned on the by-line and lobbed the ball back over the keeper and into the net off the far post to draw his side level.

The language is very plain and it is very obvious that they do not want to elaborate on the brilliance of this goal. There’s no way you’re going to descibe this goal like this. This is a painfully biased account of this goal.

Thiago Motta

. . . it was a shame that they scored their first goal with a lot of luck as there was no room to score from there.

Motta, who chose to be invisible on the pitch in this match, becomes visible and audible only with the press. He certainly needs some basic football lessons. I dont see how Chelsea was lucky. That was a smart lob from Maka. Chelsea was infact unlucky that Lamps could not control it with the first touch. He took his time and hit a headshot in the goal.

ESPN Soccernet:

The England midfielder initially miscontrolled a pass from Makelele and was driven wide of goal. It looked an impossible angle, tight to the touchline, but Lampard somehow curled a chip over Valdes and inside the back post.

‘Somehow curled a chip’ and that’s it. It was certainly not as simple as mentioned here. You can try that out yourself.

Sky Sports website:

Frank Lampard’s equaliser was equally as breath-taking in its execution. The England star had seemed to have let the ball get away from him inside the Barca box as he tried to pull down a cross, but, stuck on the byline and with options seemingly limited, Lampard swivelled and chipped Valdes from an outrageous angle.

Only Sky does some (only some) justice in explaining how difficult the goal is.

I wonder why Lampard has not got the credit he deserves for this fantastic strike. When van Persie scored a lucky (yes, definitely lucky, but I appreciate the attempt) goal, the press went all over it. In fact, if a goal identical to this Lampard goal was scored by Ronaldinho, Messi or Deco, the press might be calling this as the goal of this Champions League already.

The same happened for Drogba. When he scored his super goal against Liverpool at the Bridge, some called it a lucky goal. Now that he is doing it in increasing regularity, he has started getting more recognition.

For some reason, the press generally associates the terms like skill, technique, genius etc more with the Spanish/Italian league players (generally Brazilian/Argentinian) than with the English ones. That’s the same in the live TV commentary as well. In both the legs Chelsea players matched Barca players on every account and exceeded them in many. There is one thing about being anti-Chelsea but give credit when it is due.

I would vote this ‘el magnifico’ from Lamps for the ‘goal of this Champions league’ so far.