By Dike Imala  (Best Choice Sports Foreign Correspondent)

A new season and a new managerial appointment at Chelsea. Fated to walk into Europe’s most unforgiving managerial graveyard is a familiar face and former club’s servant – Frank Lampard. Hiring and firing is a yearly occurrence around this club, Sarri being the latest casualty of an unsatisfactory 2018/19 season despite winning Europa League and returning the club to Champions League football.

A year ago, amidst so much fanfare, Maurizio Sarri was announced to replace his fellow Italian Antonio Conte after his beleaguered countryman’s storied and troubled short tenure at the Bridge. Inheriting a dressing room befouled by internal wranglings, division and player power, the former Napoli chief set about implementing his famed ‘Sarri-ball’ philosophy.

The start was auspicious, a distinct change in style immediately overt. A side formerly labouring under Conte’s conservative and stultifying 3-4-3 system now suddenly found a new lease of life. Eden Hazard dazzled with élan, skipping past challenges like training cones. A reborn Rudigar tackled with neat illegality and Jorginho orchestrated play from the base of the midfield. An upturn in result was the natural outgrowth and a title tilt became increasingly mooted in some circles.

Then came the fallowness of November-December-January – a period characterised by chastening defeats and sterile, impotent displays. Alvaro Morata, long seen as lazy and profligate, was immediately identified as the first of many culprits by the Blues faithfuls, and so became an easy target.

“My grand-mother better pass am”, grumbled one Chelsea supporter after one of the Spaniard’s inexplicable misses against Wolves. A month later he was swept off to Atlethico Madrid. Jorginho’s clever movements and crisp passing, formerly be-lauded, were now openly mocked and greeted with howls of derision at every turn. A 6-0 schooling at the Etihad was the nadir and Sarri’s head was summarily called. The suspected axe never fell and the Italian would later steady the ship, subsequently leading the club to a Europa League success in Baku. But even with a happy end to the season, it was long clear that severance was inevitable.

And so last week, twelve months after the giddy hysteria that escorted Sarri’s appointment, he departs – a third Italian victim of Abramovic’s aristocratic insatiability after Ancelotti and Conte since 2004.

It is against this backdrop of yearly, incessant wielding of axe that Lampard, favourite with the bookmakers to assume the perilous vacant seat, must be wary. More than any one else, he knows that for this unique club, patience is never a virtue, and that adulation can instantly morph into loathing. Hazard is gone and the rebuilding job even steeper than ever. The peril eternally associated with this job must be thoroughly considered before risking his reputation and, more importantly, his fledging coaching career to avoid becoming another mere footnote in Chelsea’s gilded managerial bin, twelve months from now or even less.