Kepa Arrizabalaga returns as Chelsea give £71m man another chance

Champions League dead rubber against Krasnodar perfect opportunity for Frank Lampard

Chelsea's Kepa Arrizabalaga will be playing his first Champions League game in a year. Reuters

The last time the world’s most expensive goalkeeper took the field, a disgruntled Frank Lampard stated bluntly that Chelsea needed to cut out the errors. Kepa Arrizabalaga was culpable for Southampton’s second goal that October day. He conceded three times in 90 minutes. Since then, Edouard Mendy has only let in three goals in 11 games.

Arrizabalaga returns to the team on Tuesday, a Champions League dead rubber against Krasnodar permitting Lampard to rotate. The teenage midfielder Billy Gilmour will begin his first senior match of the season after recovering from a knee injury.

Much of the attention, though, will be on the £71 million ($94m) man. Arrizabalaga had the lowest save percentage of any Premier League regular last season; now Mendy has the highest and his excellence has allowed Lampard to recall his costly understudy.

“Kepa starts,” Lampard said. “I have no qualms about putting him back in. His situation is different now with Mendy’s form. Mendy has made himself a permanent fixture at this point. The pressure to win games means I pick people in form. Kepa has been training brilliantly well and acting brilliantly well. These periods will happen in players’ careers.”

If the Spaniard is yet to flourish on the field, he has at least impressed off it. Lampard believes he has contributed to Mendy’s fine form.

“Kepa has been very supportive. I have seen that. I watch from afar and he has been supporting him quietly and training well. That's what I look at. Goalkeepers have to push each other and I see that. His reaction has been spot on.”

It will be Arrizabalaga’s first Champions League game for a year. Lampard dropped him a few weeks before February’s clash with Bayern Munich and again a fortnight before August’s belated return, with Willy Caballero supplanting him both times.

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Now a chance has come when his position as a reserve has been cemented. “It is about attitude,” Lampard said.

He will experiment. A weakened team won 4-0 against Sevilla in Spain last week, one of the competition’s outstanding results this season. Now his options on the flanks are reduced with Callum Hudson-Odoi injured and Hakim Ziyech undergoing a scan on the hamstring injury he sustained against Leeds on Saturday.

Timo Werner may be pressed into service again with Lampard professing himself unconcerned by the summer signing’s recent misses, including an open goal against Leeds. “I have no worries about Timo,” he said.

“He has made a big impact already. He's scored some goals already, of course he'll want to be scoring more and he's missed a couple, but he is going to be a huge player for this club.”

Werner’s fellow German Kai Havertz has had more of a stop-start Chelsea career, interrupted most recently by coronavirus. Havertz has only scored once in 13 Premier and Champions League games and did not start in November but Lampard, who initially used him on the right and as a false nine, believes he has been at his best in midfield.

“He had really strong symptoms of Covid,” he said. “He was ill and struggling for quite a while. Some of the players who have had it have been symptom-free. Before his test, his form was fantastic in the No. 8 role. You could see he was enjoying it. He has all the attributes to be an absolutely top-class player for the league and the world.”

Jurgen Klopp rates Chelsea sufficiently highly that he has deemed them favourites to win the title. Lampard politely disagreed. “I'm not sure anyone actually really went for it,” he said. "I think Liverpool and Manchester City seem to be pretty much everyone's favourites, when they perform the way they have in the last three years.”