FRANK Lampard wants his Coventry City players to act on the club’s previous slow starts to the season ahead of their Championship opener this weekend.
Lampard guided the Sky Blues to an unlikely fifth place finish last season as City’s campaign ended in a cruel play-off semi-final defeat.
And City will begin the 2025/26 Championship season with a home game against Hull City.
Hull have endured a difficult summer with the club placed under a transfer embargo in July. The Tigers have since appealed against the transfer embargo.
However, Lampard expects a tough test against the Tigers ahead of a busy start to the new campaign.
Lampard said: “Happy to be back, we start again off the back of what was a really positive season for us last season, with a disappointing ending which was very clear.
“But you have to move on in football and start again and it’s one of the beauties of it in a way, so we’re ready to go.
“I haven’t set ambitions and targets, I think they’re pretty pointless at this stage.
“We’re absolutely focused on Hull, we also know we have a busy first week which goes into Luton and then Derby, all tough matches in their own right.
“We have an awareness of what the opening section looks like towards the first international break, but other than that our pure focus is on Hull.
“They’ve got good players, there’s a lot being made about their transfer situation and it’s absolutely pointless to me to focus anywhere near that because they’re a strong team with good players.”
Despite enjoying early success as Sky Blues head coach, Lampard is only looking to the season ahead and wants to improve on what he has already achieved with the club.
Coventry have failed to win any of their last three opening day fixtures with Lampard keen to avoid another slow start to the campaign.
Lampard added: “I’ve been around long enough to understand that you drive yourself again, whether you have big success or what feels like a failure in whatever form that might come.
“You can reflect on things and say there was a lot of successes last year and my drive and hunger is always the same, I always love the challenge of a new season.
“You must improve, and you must try and improve in every sense, because everyone else around you is trying to do the same, so we have to just focus on ourselves.
“We’ve had three slowish starts for different reasons for the last three seasons and that’s easy to talk about, but you have to act upon it to make sure we don’t do that again.
“Those are the challenges we’ve started to try and do from day one of pre-season.”
Coventry begin the Championship season with a home game against Hull City on Saturday, August 9 with kick-off at 12.30pm at the CBS Arena.
