Why Cole Palmer is the fourth head on Chelsea’s Mount Rushmore of genius goalscorers and has the keys to greatness

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Ahead of Chelsea's trip to Leicester City, live on TNT Sports and discovery+, Pete Sharland examines Cole Palmer's early career with the Blues. Like Gianfranco Zola, Frank Lampard and Eden Hazard before him, Palmer has become his team's primary source of goals, despite not being an out-and-out striker. But at Chelsea that doesn't matter, for it is a club built on unusual goalscorers.

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There is a wonderfully simple phrase in Spanish, "tiene gol" or put simply in English he/she/they have goal.

It is remarkable that the English lexicon doesn’t have an equally simple phrase to describe footballers with an innate goalscoring ability.

Whether you want to say 'natural goalscorer', 'knows where the goal is' or even 'tiene gol', there’s no denying that whatever it is - Cole Palmer has it.

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We’re a little over a year into Palmer’s Chelsea career and while it is difficult to make too many sweeping conclusions about the heights he might reach, we can be sure of one thing. Palmer has the gift of the goal.

It is a gift difficult to quantify. There are some players who can score hatfuls of goals, but never convince a large portion of the football public - a great example of this is Edinson Cavani. But there are others who may only be months into their career, yet you already feel extremely calm when they are in and around the penalty area. Palmer firmly falls into the latter category.

He has 32 goals in 57 games for Chelsea so far. Last season he was the second top scorer in the Premier League on 22, just five behind Golden Boot winner Erling Haaland.

This season he has seven. Only four players have more. Yes, there are caveats (he sometimes scores his goals in bursts and does take penalties) but as a winger-cum-No. 10, Palmer is clearly something special when it comes to scoring goals.

Cole Palmer scores against Burnley for Chelsea

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And there is arguably no better club for him to be at than Chelsea, one that embraces goals - particularly in the 21st century - from almost anywhere but their striker.

This is a team that at one stage saw the No. 9 shirt given to Khalid Boulahrouz, Steve Sidwell and Franco di Santo in succession. In their all-time top scorers list, midfielder Frank Lampard sits at the top and defender John Terry is in the top 20.

Lampard is without a doubt Chelsea men’s greatest attacking player of the modern era and - depending on how you feel about Didier Drogba - you could argue that the rest of the top three are also non-strikers in Gianfranco Zola and Eden Hazard.

Heck, even in the women’s team their all-time top-scorer is Fran Kirby, another player who is notably not a striker.

Frank Lampard scores for Chelsea against Blackburn Rovers

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If Zola, Lampard and Hazard were the Three Musketeers of Chelsea’s weird goalscoring camaraderie, then Palmer is their D’Artagnan, the fourth head on Chelsea’s Mt. Rushmore. And as previously stated, it is early, but in so many ways, he seems like a real hybrid of those three.

'Defenders look a bit shell-shocked' - Palmer's Lampard similarities

Let’s focus on Lampard first. A pre-Roman Abramovich signing that came to define the Oligarch’s era in South London. Across 13 seasons at Stamford Bridge, Lampard scored a ridiculous 211 goals and reached double figures in all but three campaigns (his first two and final).

No central midfielder has ever come close to being the goalscoring threat he was and only five players in Premier League history have bettered his tally of 177.

He and Palmer are completely different players, but in a couple of key ways, they are identical. First consider mentality. Lampard was known for his big goals - the two that won the title away at Bolton, the only Chelsea goal in the 2008 UCL final, the emotional penalty against Liverpool, that goal away at Barcelona, scoring in the shoot-out against Bayern Munich in the 2012 UCL final.

And despite Chelsea’s recent relative struggles, Palmer has already picked up a few memorable moments - none more so than the winner in the chaotic 4-3 win over Manchester United last season. When their team need a goal, neither Lampard nor Palmer would be found shirking the responsibility.

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The second similarity comes in something that is equally difficult to quantify by data. Remember when we said earlier that what Palmer has in terms of knowing how to score goals can’t be taught? That is perhaps best demonstrated by the way he just seems to know when to time his run to make sure he is on the end of a cross or loose ball. Remind you of anyone?

Take a look at these two clips below of Palmer and Lampard scoring side-by-side. In the first one, both actually start the move (though Palmer cuts in a bit late to see that) and feed it out with the ball eventually getting to a wide player who goes to the byline and puts in the cross.

On the left, just before the ball is played, there are four defenders between Palmer and Raheem Sterling. On the right, you can see a similar situation for Lampard before Ashley Cole plays his cross.

Yet they are both in perfect positions to beat the numbers and score the goal. Both Cole and Sterling deserve credit for terrific crosses, but this is some Matrix stuff from Palmer and Lampard.

Cole Palmer and Frank Lampard side by side goals Number 1

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In this next clip, Palmer isn’t even involved; he seems to be watching as Marc Cucurella goes on the overlap and again times his run perfectly. Like the first clip, Lampard starts his move but this time he makes a run, bursting through the lines and gets on the end of a one-two with Carlton Cole perfectly.

In both clips, the defenders look a bit shell-shocked as to what just happened. As if someone turned out the lights, then turned them back on and suddenly Chelsea had scored.

Yes, Palmer doesn’t score as many long-range goals as Lampard was renowned for, but the innate sense of timing combined with the intelligence of movement and quickness of thought they share is remarkable.

Cole Palmer and Frank Lampard side by side goals Number 2

Video credit: TNT Sports

'His brain is right there with the Belgian' - Palmer approach like quick-thinking Hazard

And speaking of intelligence, let’s talk about Hazard - shall we? Because in many ways, his path has the most interesting crossover with Palmer’s. Both were bought as wide players with more of an eye on creating chances than scoring them.

Yes, Hazard did score 20 goals in Ligue 1 during his last season with Lille, but there was scepticism about whether that kind of goalscoring was sustainable in England. Hoo-boy was it.

Hazard scored 110 goals in 352 games in London and failed to reach a combined 20 G+A in the league just twice in his seven seasons. In a similar vein, Palmer had shown flashes of being able to do both roles during his time with the City youth team but again, could he do that at the top level? 33 G+A in his first season pretty emphatically answers that question.

For many years, Chelsea fans wondered as to Hazard’s potential effectiveness if he moved in from the left to play as a No. 10, similar to what Palmer did so early in his career with the Blues. The Belgian, of course, played the role at times, but either due to the presence of other players or tactical preferences of managers he never did it consistently.

Of course, the one key difference between the players – Hazard’s other worldly dribbling skills – might have meant that he was wasted inside and was better starting out wide, but it’s certainly an interesting hypothetical to consider.

One characteristic Hazard and Palmer do share is how quickly their minds work. Even if Palmer’s feet aren’t quite as quick as Hazard’s, his brain is right there with the Belgian.

So often it seems that they make a run or wait for a run to be made that their team-mates simply haven’t seen or even conceived, sometimes it can feel as if some nifty video editor has put them in fast-forward compared to the other 21 players on the pitch.

And what better goal comparison to show that than Hazard’s famous goal against West Ham and Palmer against Everton? Here Palmer uses a team-mate and Hazard doesn’t (at least except to sell the defence on the idea that he might play a one-two) but the creativity, the intelligence and the sheer bloody-mindedness that if they want to just take over the game, in that moment, there is no player on this pitch who can stop them is what unites them.

People often remember Hazard as a flair player but his drive and determination were two of his strongest qualities. Which brings us nicely to Zola.

Cole Palmer and Eden Hazard side by side goals

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'The guiding light for this team' - Palmer heading towards Zola-like Icon status

With Zola, there is no obvious comparison to make bar one. Zola rarely did what was expected, but there was always a purpose. And perhaps that is the common thread that binds these four together, it comes from Zola (the Athos of the group if you like, although he’s almost certainly Aramis).

The Sardinian wizard combined flair and a unique creativity with a ruthless drive towards a common purpose. He didn’t put defenders on the floor for fun, he didn’t nutmeg opponents because the mood took him, and he certainly didn’t score headers despite being the best part of 5"5, because he wanted to make men much bigger than him feel bad about themselves.

Perhaps they were all fun perks but he did each thing because beneath all that flair there was a ruthless winning spirit.

Before Zola arrived in 1996, Chelsea’s last major trophies were the FA Cup in 1970 and the Cup Winners’ Cup the year after. By the time he left in 2003, Chelsea had won two FA Cups, one League Cup, one Charity Shield, another Cup Winners’ Cup and a UEFA Super Cup.

Compared to the trophy cabinet today, that might not seem like much but that Chelsea team pre-Abramovich was key in helping instill the winning culture that came to go on to bigger and better things under the Russian owner.

There are a lot of players who were key to making Chelsea winners, but Zola was undeniably one of the most important. The legend goes that when Abramovich bought the club in 2003 he was so desperate to keep Zola, who was in the process of negotiating a return home to Sardinia with Cagliari, that he tried to buy the Italian club from Massimo Cellino.

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That thread of winning extended from Zola to Lampard, who he played with for two seasons. From there, that thread extended from Lampard to Hazard after they overlapped again for two seasons. After Hazard, there is not a clear thread to get us to Palmer.

Did it go through defenders Cesar Azpilicueta and Thiago Silva? Most probably, in many ways, in the post-Hazard era, they were the two real focal points of the team, trying to keep a ship that was so full of holes afloat that eventually even their formidable spirits couldn’t save it.

But now the club has Palmer. In a squad with an oft-injured captain and few clear leaders, he has become the guiding light for this team and this fan-base.

It is he they look to to decide close games and generally set the standards. He may not be the most vocal but wherever Palmer goes, the rest of Chelsea as a club will follow.

He is walking in the footsteps of the great ones before him, and he has everything at his disposal to forever mark his place in the Chelsea history books.

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