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Earlier in the season, Frank Lampard spent some time with Rodri at Manchester City, breaking down the Ballon d’Or winner’s game as part of a “midfield masterclass” that he was filming.
“I did about a 50-second run of him against Aston Villa where he was scanning through the pitch,” former Chelsea and England midfielder Lampard tells The Athletic. “He kind of went deep, got the ball, checked his shoulder five times, did it again and ended up putting (Ilkay) Gundogan through on goal. So he’s a scanner.”
Lampard was a scanner too. When Geir Jordet, a professor at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, carried out a study a decade or so ago, after getting his hands on a pile of Premier League ‘Player Cam’ DVDs, he discovered that Lampard scanned more frequently than any of the other 117 footballers he watched.
“Scanning is looking away from the ball with the intention to gather information that can then be used when I later engage with the ball,” Jordet says. “Either I get the ball when we are in possession, or I’m trying to defend, so I’m engaging with a player who will get the ball on the opposing team.
Lampard’s head is constantly turning one way and then the other, surveying everything around him – team-mates, opponents, space.
It makes you wonder what Lampard thinks when he watches that video now.
“What I think is that it’s almost completely subconscious,” he replies. “I was probably slightly aware, but I was never aware of doing it to the extent that I did. That’s the surprising thing. It became like something that was a bit… built-in, I guess.
Looking back on my game now – and sometimes it’s easier to reflect when you’re finished because you watch modern players and you see clips like you’ve just shown me there – I do understand that the things that I was probably quite good at as a midfield player… I wasn’t an amazing-in-tight-areas-get-myself-out-of-trouble kind of player. But I did have that understanding of what was around me, so it would help to know where pressure was coming, how much pressure was coming, where my team-mates were, where the opposition were. You’re forever creating a picture in your head. And I did do a lot of that.
“Pictures” is the word that Lampard’s father, Frank Snr, a former player and then coach at West Ham United, repeatedly used when his son was a schoolboy.
Some footballers seem to know that kind of thing instinctively.
Jamie O’Hara told a story to UK newspaper The Guardian years ago about a training session at Tottenham Hotspur when he was bellowing at striker Dimitar Berbatov to pass to him. Midfielder O’Hara assumed that Berbatov, who had his back to play and was positioned on the other side of the pitch, hadn’t seen him – until a ball dropped perfectly into his stride seconds later. Afterwards, Berbatov had a word with O’Hara. “He said to me, ‘I know where you are. You don’t have to shout’.”
Lionel Messi could play with the game on mute. He never misses a trick – a clip was doing the rounds on social media a little while ago showing him scanning during a kickabout at a child’s birthday party.
Scouring the pitch for information in actual matches, Messi can often be seen flicking his eyes one way and then the other (Jordet calls this micro-scanning). On other occasions, such as before setting up Argentina’s opening goal against the Netherlands in the 2022 World Cup quarter-finals, Messi looks like a pedestrian about to cross a road as he turns his head fully to the left and then to the right while slowly walking towards where the play is developing. When he explodes into life seconds later, everything seems to be mapped out in his mind.
