It will be a miracle if Steven Gerrard holds it together on Saturday on Merseyside. This, his last outing at Anfield for Liverpool, is probably the first time he will truly accept he is never going to win a league title with Liverpool.
It is both a tribute to Gerrard and an indictment of English football that the closing phases of Gerrard’s flickeringly brilliant career have evoked more public emotion and interest than the actual winning of that league. Chelsea have stomped with unerring authority towards their fourth league title, third under José Mourinho, and last Sunday at Stamford Bridge, the Blues fans amused themselves by goading and taunting Gerrard when Liverpool visited their ground before breaking into an unexpected standing ovation when he was substituted with 12 minutes remaining.
The gesture was generally dismissed as being hypocritical. But it wasn’t that. In their own way, Chelsea fans have had an intense and prolonged relationship with Gerrard. By turning down Mourinho’s overtures a decade ago, Gerrard spurned Chelsea – and with it his best chance to win the league. He rejected newly omnipotent Chelsea and his decision not to leave Liverpool must have contributed to the increasingly bitter edge that characterised matches between the clubs.
Of the 14 questions put to Brendan Rodgers yesterday about Steven Gerrard’s leaving ofLiverpool, six related to his mooted return. A pensioner, lucky enough to have witnessed far better Liverpool teams than the current captain has ever played in, choked up when asked for a tribute by a television reporter outside Anfield.
Hundreds have scrawled good luck messages on a giant board in the Liverpool One shopping centre, many urging him to stay. The club’s figurehead for a generation is not out the door but it seems few are ready to relinquish the hope that Gerrard has given Liverpool these past 17 years.
Gerard Houllier will be among the crowd for Gerrard’s 354th and final Anfield appearance against Crystal Palace today and it is worth rewinding to November 2002 for a piece of advice the former Liverpool manager dispensed at a delicate stage in the midfielder’s career.
Worldwide respect
10 trophies and more than 700 appearances for his boyhood club for baggage, he can have few regrets. The absence of a Premier League winner’s medal is his biggest lament, of course. It is the only silverware available at club level that Gerrard never got his hands on, a fact he will never be allowed to forget. But that space in the trophy room, that slip, lends a fitting poignancy to the Liverpool captain’s career.
“This is a guy who is very much about looking after his people. He loves his city. He’s had a number of opportunities to move to prestigious clubs but Liverpool is his home, he grew up around the corner, this is his place and these are the people he loves. What he’s given to this city, politicians haven’t given to this city.
“All the work he does for local hospitals and charities goes unheralded. He is a wonderful symbol for the people here and an incredible icon of the club. You see in Barcelona they have the quote ‘more than a club’. You look at Steven Gerrard and he is more than football.”
Indefatigable Liverpool and Rodgers have had time to prepare for Gerrard’s exit as age catches up with the once-dynamic midfielder and the manager’s system sometimes strains to accommodate his captain. Yet this season has still delivered examples of the indefatigable spirit that will always be associated with the club’s fifth European Cup triumph in Istanbul in 2005.
Against Basel in December, with Liverpool needing a win to reach the knockout phase of the Champions League, only the 34-year-old Gerrard reached the standard required, his late goal earning a draw but not a reprieve on a par with Olympiakos a decade earlier.
Then Liverpool ended a banana skin of a third-round FA Cup tie at AFC Wimbledon in January indebted to two goals from Gerrard, on his first appearance since announcing his decision to leave the club for LA Galaxy.
Who shoulders that responsibility now? The reluctance to accept that Gerrard’s time is over and the fixation on when he is coming back arguably stems from the fact there is no obvious answer.
Guardian Service
0 comments :
Post a Comment