Frank Lampard outlines ‘real opportunity’ as Coventry City boss offers fresh start

Coventry City pre-season news from CoventryLive as Frank Lampard outlines clean slate for peripheral Sky Blues players

Frank Lampard has informed his Coventry City team that they have a “real opportunity” to push themselves into his thoughts and into contention for the upcoming Championship season.

The Sky Blues are now in Portugal on a pre-season training camp that will culminate with the club’s first friendly matchup on Saturday, a behind-closed-doors match believed to be against a Portuguese team whose name is being kept under wraps for now.

And the head coach is certain that the opening game and future warm-up games will provide opportunities for players who did not participate last season to shine.

“We’ve got their first match minutes (on Saturday), we’ve been working towards that and it’s important that we start the games because that’s when you can see the work we’re doing and how that translates onto the pitch,” says Lampard.

“It gives everyone those first minutes to get into their legs and gives some players who maybe didn’t play so many minutes towards the back end of last season the chance to show individually what they can do to be competitive, because when we were in the run-in last season sometimes the team can feel quite regular, so for those players who felt they weren’t playing so much now is a real opportunity for them to show in pre-season what they can do.”

Players in this group include centre-back Luis Binks, attackers Norman Bassette and Brandon Thomas-Asante, and winger Raphael Borges Rodrigues.

Speaking to the club’s media team, he added: “It’s also beneficial for me and the staff to see the effort we do on the training pitch translated into a game. It’s early days, so you don’t have high expectations, but you want to see some positive results from the effort and see how we’ll progress.”