Frank Lampard

Lampard is confident Chelsea can lift the trophy at Wembley in May, finally securing the honour for the Blues – who won the Premier League and FA Cup double in Carlo Ancelotti’s first season in charge at Stamford Bridge last term.

The 32-year-old does not believe that there are any concerns over the age of the squad, though Nicolas Anelka, Yossi Benayoun and Didier Drogba are all over 30 and John Terry and Ashley Cole both 29.

Lampard is relieved to be available again after suffering a hernia injury which ruled him out of England’s opening two Euro 2012 qualifiers, and is loving life with the Blues, who sit top of the Premie League.

He said in the the Daily Star Sunday: “It is a load of rubbish when I hear talk about there only being one or two years left in our spine. This has been going on for a year or so.

“Sometimes that is mind games from other managers, or press talk. But we proved them wrong last year.

“We have got players here who are experienced and you can’t buy experience in football. Look at Didier, he will overpower any player who is 24 or 25.

“People have been talking about Paul Scholes and rightly so. If you took him out of the United team now, they’d need to replace him – and probably wouldn’t be able to.”

Meanwhile, Ancelotti has denied coming under pressure to win the Champions League from owner Roman Abramovich.

Reports have claimed that the Russian was insisting on European success, putting pressure on the manager as he takes his team into the Champions League campaign with a match against MSK Zilna on Wednesday night.

But the Italian says most of the pressure he feels comes from within himself.

Ancelotti said: “I speak with Roman a lot, but he is not obsessed with the Champions League He wants to win everything, but he’s not desperate. I don’t have pressure from outside.

“I want to put myself under pressure because I want to win, he wants a team with a clear identity and we have created that.”

In last season’s Champions League they were unbeaten in the group stages and topped their group, but were beaten 3-1 on aggregate by Inter in the first knockout round.

This season’s group stage pits them against Zilna from Slovakia, Russians Spartak Moscow and French side Marseille (Chelsea 2/9 to win the group).

Ancelotti said: “We don’t want to say the Premier League is not very important – we would like to win it again. But the normal step is to do things better than we did last season in the Champions League. We went out too early.”

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