Football hysteria makes me laugh sometimes.
One minute you’re full of optimism for the season ahead, the next you throw away all hope and think “oh well try again next year”. The opening two matches for Liverpool were a case and point of that.
It’s astounding how quickly people can change their minds, however, at the same time some people seem adamant to label someone or something regardless of the situation. This is Jordan Henderson’s Liverpool career in a nutshell.
There seems to be an ongoing trend around football to criticize Henderson at any given opportunity. Now, I like Jordan Henderson, I don’t think he’s an elite player and most likely he never will b,e but I acknowledge what he does for the team and what he can bring to it.
He’s struggled to reach the heights he hit from 2013/14 to the 2014/15 season but that, in my opinion, is largely due to injuries.
Like any player in our squad, I criticize him when he’s had a poor performance and I praise him when he’s had a good game.
Unfortunately, the majority of Liverpool fans, and other fans as well, have made it their lifelong duty to slate him after every match he plays.
This is something I genuinely can’t understand.
I get that you don’t like him as a player, that’s your opinion, but to completely disregard that he is capable of doing anything on the pitch is just plain ignorance. I expect it from rival fans but the stick he gets from his own fanbase is just baffling.
There are two examples in the past year that shows this happening.
In England’s final group match against Slovakia, Roy Hodgson’s side drew 0-0 to finish second in the group. Jordan Henderson started that game in midfield as England rotated their squad. After the 90 minutes, there was a constant debate as to who was responsible for us not winning the match on Twitter. Surprise, surprise, Jordan Henderson was the main culprit.
Now if you look back at the match you’d see that Henderson was one of the few players to come out with any credit. He set up two clear cut chances and was getting forward at any opportunity to support the attack.
However, he’s Jordan Henderson, therefore that’s not possible right?
This was heavily compounded by the fact that an unfit Jack Wilshere came on the pitch and was awful throughout, yet he didn’t get a single shred of criticism.
Another more recent example is something I saw on Twitter right after the Burnley result. Now, we all know it was a rather shocking performance, that goes without saying, but somebody decided to post a ‘highlights’ video of Henderson’s performance throughout, deliberately shaming him and him alone for the match.
This is confusing for two reasons.
- As bad as Henderson was, everyone in a Liverpool shirt performed badly – and he wasn’t even the worst performer in my opinion. So showing one bad performer in a team full of them is pointless.
- This person is supposedly a Liverpool fan, so why on Earth does it cross your mind to do this? He’s still a player for the club yet, like many other fans, it is for some reason impossible to support him.
To me, it looked like a way just to get retweets. That’s it. Nothing more. Why anyone spends their time making compilation videos on a player’s poor performance for a retweet on twitter is beyond me.
I’m not saying Henderson is above criticism because he’s not, but the extent to which people go to in order to slag off a player is bordering on ridiculous.
Whether you like it or not he’s still a Liverpool player and, as it stands, he’s still Liverpool’s captain. Just give it a rest and try giving him some support, it’s not that hard.
