"When you’re an average player, you want to be a good player," he said. "Now I’m good, I want to be great."

When he was a boy, being great meant being as good as Paul Gascoigne. "Obviously with my dad playing for West Ham I used to follow them, but the midfielder who inspired me most when I watched football on TV was Gazza.

"I loved to watch him and tried to emulate him when I was playing. Of course, I couldn’t do those tricks as well as he could," he says with a laugh.

He has learned from many other role models since. "I would say Zinedine Zidane is the best I’ve ever played against," says the 27-year-old England midfielder, "even though he wasn’t at his pure best against us.

"But when you see him on the pitch you realise what a genius he is, how the ball just seems to stick to him. He’s got his own style, so he’s not that easy to emulate, but you can’t help watch a player like that and try to bring a few of their touches into your own game."

Watching - and learning - from talent is one thing, but there are other lessons, he says, you have to heed if you want to improve as a player. "When I came to Chelsea, I used to watch Gianfranco Zola. After training, he was always practising - free-kicks, shots, the lot... watching him you got to see just how he became as great as he was."

Lampard still puts in the hours of extra training, although he admits he often focuses on one aspect of his game. "Shooting, especially from long range, comes in useful for a midfielder and I still like to score goals, especially the ones people remember, the spectacular goals."

When he was a boy, scoring goals - remarkable ones like those Gazza used to score - seemed the most beautiful aspect of the beautiful game.

His dad, a stylish left-back, had won two FA Cup-winners’ medals in the same West Ham United side as Trevor Brooking, in 1975 and 1980, but the young Lampard wanted to make his mark further up the pitch.

"I used to play on a Sunday and three or four nights a week for other teams. Like a lot of kids, I liked being up front, liked the glory of scoring goals." He hasn’t lost that taste, as he showed last summer when David Beckham’s free-kick curled into the box in the 38th minute against France.

Michael Owen recalls the moment Lampard glanced the ball into the net: "As we were celebrating, Wayne Rooney said to me, ‘Blimey, I thought you’d scored that.’ Frank had made contact with his head a yard in front of me and the next thing I knew, the ball was in the top corner."

Such goals are some consolation because the young Lampard soon had to face his own limitations as a forward. "I realised I didn’t have the lightning pace you usually need to be a striker and I had the kind of footballing brain that understood the game best when I am playing in midfield."

Over the last 18 months, he has silenced the doubters and emerged as a class act in the middle of the park for club and country. His old Chelsea manager Claudio Ranieri summed up Lampard’s growth as a player succinctly when he said: "For him, phenomenal became the norm."

As you might expect, for a player who has had such an intense footballing education, he has his own firm ideas about the qualities that define a great midfield player. "You can’t just attack or defend. In the modern game, you need to do both. You look at the great players in this role, like Vieira, Keane, Gerrard and they’re all box-to-box.

"Often these days, goals aren’t scored when your side is on the attack, but when you win the ball back and, if you’re clever, you can play the right ball and release a player before the other side have had a chance to organise.

"You need to have the passing to make the team tick, to keep possession, to make the killer pass. You need the intelligence to read the game.

"As a player, you need to have a picture of what’s happening around you in your head before you receive the ball because if you have to look around to see what’s on, you’ll lose the ball. The game’s that quick now.

"You need to understand your job, everyone else’s job and when your job has to change for the good of the team.

"If you don’t understand tactics as a player, at the top level you’ll get exposed. And, if you’re going to be the complete midfielder, you need aggression - and that’s certainly a quality you find in players like Keane and Gerrard."

Lampard may talk like the consummate professional, but he still reacts like a fan sometimes. He wasn’t, he admits now, even sure he would get a game for England at Euro 2004, but the tournament was, he says, the most memorable month of his life.

"You watch tournaments like that on television when you’re a kid and then you’re playing in one, flicking the TV on and seeing how things are building up back home," he stops for a second, trying to put the feeling into words. "It was weird - and brilliant."