Likeable Frank Lampard has a job on his hands to bridge the gap at Chelsea

While this enthralling summer of sport does not end yet with the Tour de France still to be decided and the small matter of an Ashes series just a week away, it is time to start giving some focus to 2019-20 ante-post football bets.

With transfers still possible for another fortnight and a lot of business likely to be done there are plenty of teams who are not worth analysing because their squads could alter significantly, but one that will not is Chelsea’s.

The transfer ban means we can be fairly sure which cards new manager Frank Lampard has to play with, and how he fares will be one of the most fascinating aspects of the upcoming season.

The range of possibilities is wide, albeit the upper limit of what he can achieve is probably a top-four spot given how dominant Manchester City and Liverpool look.

But the potential for his return to Stamford Bridge to be a chronic disappointment is also high although if things do go wrong his widely-perceived inexperience is unlikely to be a factor.

Plenty of people claim the Chelsea vacancy came a year too soon for the former darling of the Blues’ fans, but he seems perfectly ready to me.

Lampard strikes me as someone who would have observed how coaches operated throughout his career and this intelligent man will have picked up all he needs to know to augment his own ideas about management.

But he returns to west London with two key disadvantages, namely the recent departure of Eden Hazard and the fact that the club is unable to buy players in this or the next transfer window due to a Fifa ban relating to rule breaches involving youth players.

Apart from Wilfried Zaha at Crystal Palace there is no other player who would be as hard to replace for a club as Hazard, who left an enormous hole when he joined Real Madrid. While Christian Pulisic, who was loaned back to Borussia Dortmund last season, will help to partially fill the void he cannot be expected to be anything like as influential as the brilliant Belgian.

For all that Chelsea are unable to chuck money around as liberally as they usually do, they will not lack for numbers, with scores of loan players available for recall should the club choose to, as they have with the likes of Mason Mount, Tammy Abraham and Kurt Zouma.

Those three will add depth to a squad that, Hazard apart, will be similar to last season’s but the trouble is they were 26 points off top spot last term and without Hazard they cannot conceivably close that gap.

Moreover, Chelsea face fierce competition to make the Champions League, with bookmakers rating them marginally odds-against to secure a top-four place, which is not surprising on the basis that there are a maximum of two places realistically available.

And if you think that means any two from four of Spurs, Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester United I suggest you think again.

This could be the season in which we stop referring to the big six. There is a big two, a clear third-best team in Spurs and then another group who will scrap for fourth place, and it consists of the other three established top-echelon teams as well as Leicester, Wolves, Everton and West Ham, all four of whom I fancy to close the gap.

In fact I would go as far as to suggest Leicester at 9-2 to finish in the top six is the best ante-post Premier League price currently on offer.

Whatever is giving Lampard headaches as the new season approaches, the defensive unit should not be among them, with the personnel largely unchanged and no particular problems from last term to be remedied.

But he is not going to retain the Sarri template further upfield and this is where the key decisions will need to be made. We have seen a diamond and a 4-2-3-1 in pre-season, and it is the latter formation that will probably be the default option, with Kante moving back to join Jorginho.

That will theoretically work better than last term in that Kante can free up Jorginho to display what we were promised was his impressive range of passing, from short and sharp to long and penetrative, but which basically turned out to be mostly easy and dull for most of the time under Sarri.

The three more offensive midfielders are likely to be Willian, Barkley and Pulisic, which does not represent an obvious upgrade, but it is in attack that the transfer ban is set to hit hardest, with Lampard obliged to choose one from Giroud, Abraham and Michy Batshuayi.

Abraham is a player who has always shaped like he could be excellent, but he rarely looked like a top-six Prem spearhead at Villa, and it was a similar story with Batshuayi at Palace, where he occasionally looked like a decent finisher but more often resembled a Championship player.

So that leaves Giroud, which is no bad thing as he is a player who brings far more to the table than his goals record suggests, but it remains the weakest group of forwards of any of the teams with Champions League aspirations.

And then there is the question of how patient the big cheeses will be if it becomes obvious from an early stage that Chelsea cannot compete for the title. Will Lampard get a longer period of mercy than his predecessors based on the love everyone there has for him for his achievements as a player and the constraints under which he is operating?

Or will he be jettisoned as ruthlessly as is normally the case when a Blues boss does not meet the lofty standards expected of them, which is what those who have taken the 14-1 for the sack race will be hoping happens?

It will be fascinating to see how Chelsea’s first season under Lampard develops. I hope it goes well because he is a likeable person whose career was a monument to hard work and dedication and who talks sensibly and interestingly.

There is every chance he will be regarded as a great manager by the time his career as a gaffer is over, and if he is given time he might even be capable of eventually bringing Chelsea back to a position in which there is no better English team.

But time is not something Chelsea have a history of giving their managers and Lampard will have to hit the ground running, starting with the opening weekend assignment at Old Trafford. If pushed I would say they will finish fifth. And if they do will Lampard have already been pushed?

Plenty of hurdles for The Athletic to overcome

If Chelsea are not allowed to buy players due to their ban, it is less obvious why a number of other top-flight teams are being equally inert when it comes to recruitment, as the current window continues to be a slow-burner in terms of exciting deals.

But away from the pitch and into the press box it is a different story. While I have a fundamental allergy to journalists writing about journalists, this is a development that could have significant changes for anyone who counts reading about football among their interests.

That’s because a new entrant to the UK football media market is currently snapping up talent in a way that makes Man City look as though they have the spending power of Bury. It is called The Athletic and is an American sports news provider that is branching out into Britain.

In a matter of weeks they have snapped up some of the best-known football writers and editors from the established national and local newspapers with a combination of juicy salaries and a share in the company.

To access Athletic content will cost somewhere in the region of £40 a year, but in order to cover the cost of employing big names such as the Guardian’s Danny Taylor and David Ornstein of the BBC they are going to require a lot of subscribers.

It may work. The focus, as in America, will be on giving customers the best coverage of the club they support, but the obvious reasons to take a pessimistic view of its chances of succeeding are that the existing media coverage of football in England is extremely good and that people have become accustomed to getting their needs met without having to pay.

Moreover, while the people they have recruited are easily good enough to provide a fantastic service, I am perfectly prepared to believe the vast majority of people who consume football content neither know nor care about the name on the byline, so marketing the message that they have assembled all this talent will not be easy.

There are many captivating storylines to be played out on Premier League pitches this season, and it will also be intriguing to see how the Athletic’s bold entry into the pay-to-read football market pans out.

Officials have to call time on slow play

Message to the people responsible for policing slow play in golf: you are a pathetic disgrace.

JB Holmes, a regular culprit when it comes to taking far too long to play his shots but far from the only one, was once again faffing about at Portrush last week and disrespectfully affecting playing partner Brooks Koepka’s performance as a consequence.

But this happens countless times in every tournament, with numerous players guilty, and nothing is ever done. It is hard to think of a more gutless example of sports governance, and it needs addressing urgently.

Holmes laboured to a closing 87 in the Open, raising the question of just how much more abysmal his score would have been if he had stopped being so selfish and played at a sensible pace.

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