I have a complicated relationship with Steven Gerrard. Although of course, it’s all in my head. Maybe younger fans won’t relate to this, but it gets a little weird when your team’s heroes are quite a bit younger than you are. You no longer idolise players in the way you did when you were a kid, looking up to grown men whose ability with a football represents all your hopes and dreams.
When Alex Ferguson claimed recently – in his error-strewn autobiography – that Gerrard wasn’t a “top top player”, the retired United manager simply showed himself up in public. If he was talking about the elite pantheon of Maradona, Cryuff, Pele and Messi, then yes, the Liverpool captain is not a “top top player” but Ferguson seemed to imply Gerrard wasn’t as good as quite a few of his own club’s midfielders, some of whom aren’t fit to lace Gerrard’s boots.
There’s no doubt that Gerrard has been a phenomenon; arguably one of the finest all-rounders the game has ever seen. Equally, he in not without his flaws, and at times they can lead to head-scratching. Somehow, no matter what he does, we always expect more.
In September 2000, before I’d begun to write about football for a living, I sent my best-ever Liverpool XI into the match-day magazine, and it was published. In the centre of midfield I included a 20-year-old Steven Gerrard, alongside the fearsome Graeme Souness, who had seen and done (and won) it all. For all its implicit prematurity, I felt that I’d seen the future in the previous few months, starting with Gerrard’s jaw-dropping display against a strong Leeds United team at Anfield. I left the game in awe of the range of his passing and the pace and power he displayed.
If you told me then precisely what Gerrard would go on to achieve, I’d have felt that even my hyperbole possibly even underplayed his potential. This, after all, is a player who within less than five years of that piece would win the man-of-the-match in helping the Reds beat AC Milan in a Champions League Final. In 2000 such a feat seemed impossible for a club that around that time lost at home to Leicester in the Premier League on a Champions League night. It felt like another world.
His spectacular late goal against Olympiakos set the Reds on the way to that success, and it was his headed goal in the final that started the fightback. He also won the penalty that led to the equaliser, and then, in injury time, he had a spell excelling at right-back.
Gerrard’s CV also includes a goal against Manchester United in a League Cup Final victory, and possibly the best strike I’ve ever seen in the flesh to take the 2006 FA Cup Final to penalties; I can’t recall another goal that came so explosively out of nowhere – had he hit it any slower the full-time whistle might have blown before it reached the keeper.
He also scored in the 2001 Uefa Cup Final victory over Alavés, and went on to play in another Champions League Final, although this time his finishing let him down. To have appeared in two such finals, and even have one virtually named after you, would be a highlight on most top players’ CVs.
To date he has won seven major trophies with the Reds and a further four “trinkets” (Super Cups/Charity Shields). When Rafa Benítez replaced Gérard Houllier in 2004, the captain went on to enjoy three 20+ goal seasons, and recently passed the 100 mark for league strikes. He also recently passed the 100 cap mark for England – equalling Bobby Moore’s 108 last month – and has racked up almost two-dozen individual awards in fifteen years. He is famous the world over.
And yet … there’s still a slight sense of disappointment surrounding his career. Even though it has exceeded all sensible expectations, there was something about the young Gerrard that suggested he could have taken to the field on his own, and somehow covered every position in leading Liverpool to victory in a game of 11 vs 1.
All those years ago anything seemed possible. Perhaps I thought he’d also develop the powers of flight, a shield of invincibility, maybe even a cloak of invisibility. He was less Roy of the Rovers, more something out of the pages of DC or Marvel. In the end, he turned out to be just a bloody good footballer.
Gerrard falls short in some ways when compared with players like Pirlo, Xavi or even Paul Scholes. But he also has special powers that those luminaries lacked. At 33, those powers are naturally on the wane, but when you see the way he marauded through to seal the England game against Poland, you wonder if he’s still capable of such feats of pace, strength and skill on a more regular basis for Liverpool.
Perhaps our perceptions of Gerrard have also been altered with the way the game has developed. When he was younger his long passes were thrilling, particularly with the counter-attacking philosophy of Gérard Houllier, and the ball over the top for Michael Owen (before the novelty wore off).
More recently these Exocets have been derided as “Hollywood passes”, which can often be unfair. A brilliant long pass is a brilliant long pass; but if it doesn’t reach its intended target, even if it’s out by inches, it’s dubbed a Hollywood pass. Sometimes Gerrard overdoes it with the range and ambition, but even unsuccessful long passes can make an opposition defence wary of that particular threat, especially if they push out and leave space in behind.
However, since the late ‘90s, English football has grown increasingly tactical, and Gerrard grew up in a less enlightened age. He has still managed to thrive over the years, with the help of various managers, but perhaps the game’s evolution from ‘blood and thunder’ towards patient passing stopped him looking even better. To me, Gerrard has always looked better speeding a game up than slowing it down.
I also get a sense of unease when he talks about dropping deeper as he gets older, to do the “Scholes or Xavi role”. It implies that he thinks he’s perfectly suited to it, but they are/were more patient players than Gerrard, whose own stardom was built on all-action style.
Having said that, players can adapt, and as Gerrard showed last month against Fulham, he can still dominate a game if given plenty of time and space. It’s just that other games seem to pass him by, in a manner which never used happen. At times I ask myself what kind of player he is these days, as at times it’s hard to know.
For all his tactical failings, and his occasional flawed leadership (in that he can seem moody and wrapped up in his own game), he remains the best Liverpool player since Kenny Dalglish, and some would say he’s the club’s best ever.
At his peak he was totally phenomenal; a force of nature. He scored and created goals out of nothing, and powered past opposition players as if they weren’t there. His finishing grew increasingly smart, with the trademark piledrivers of old supplemented with some subtle one-on-one slides and dinks as he raced into the box. Albeit with the aid of penalties, he transformed from scoring at a one-in-ten ratio in his first 240 games to one-in-three over the next 400, with 134 goals since 2004.
His free-kicks into the box are often impossible to defend, although his corners used to be far easier for the opposition to deal with; however, he’s even improved in that area as he’s got older, with a much increased accuracy rate.
The next year or two will be interesting. Most players at Gerrard’s age find themselves featuring less frequently, although Liverpool are only likely to play 40-45 matches this season, so rotation is not quite so much of an issue. (Finding the correct role for him in the current side, and achieving midfield balance, is a whole other debate.)
Rodgers rarely removes Gerrard, and starts him whenever fit, but there will come a point where that’s no longer possible. A World Cup in the summer heat of Brazil will test the captain’s endurance next season, that’s for sure, especially if the Reds finish in the top four and undergo a busy start.
From a personal perspective I hope he retires from England duty in July, by which time he should have become the country’s most capped outfield player, with his current total of 108 just seven behind David Beckham’s 115. I fear that he won’t do so, however, as he seems like one of those who will keep going, and that rather than retire, he will have to be switched off at the mains.
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