Unless you’ve failed to look out of your window for the past week you’ll be aware that long time Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard has announced he will leave the club at the end of the season, bringing to end one of modern football’s longest running love affairs. No, not between Gerrard and Liverpool, but his relationship with Kopites scattered across the world.
I am a lifelong Liverpool supporter. By admitting this it allows me to discard one particular journalistic shackle which I find impossible to uphold when discussing this current topic, objectivity. Everything I go on to say during this column will be communicated through red eyes, I wish this was not the case but any Liverpool fan who says they can speak with an ounce of neutrality on the subject, may be saying so rather mendaciously.
Let me start by saying this is not an obituary, there are still many months left in which to see Gerrard wearing the famous red, encompassing I’m sure plenty more highs and lows, and beyond that several years to watch him ply his craft as only he can in whatever part of the world he sees fit.
With Friday’s announcement came the inevitable comparisons to others in the pantheon of greats, not just those who had made their name at Anfield, but players the world over. Whether or not Gerrard will go down as Liverpool’s greatest ever player? Whether he will go down as the Premier League’s best midfielder? Or whether he was ever the world’s best? The question I would ask is whether it really matters at all?
The questions themselves are impossible. Every player competes under different circumstances, in different eras, with different players around them and against different opposition. Stats can often be deceiving and even if they told an exact truth would they genuinely align every mind in the country with the same unflinching opinion on who was the ‘greatest’? (If it did the quality of barroom discussion would certainly plummet).
The players who seem to come up more than any others in comparison conversations with Gerrard are Paul Scholes and Frank Lampard. Rightly or wrongly the three will be forever intertwined long after they have all hung up their boots, but a primitive conversation on ‘who is the best’ is already becoming derivative. It will never be solved there is not one magical answer that will convince advocates for the other two that your choice is inherently better, you could show me every statistic in the world proving that Scholes or Lampard is better Gerrard and I simply (and perhaps blindly) would not accept it.
For me football is not about numbers, it’s about moments.
Moments like Istanbul, an irreplaceable memory that still brings a tear to my eye at the very thought of it. Or moments like last year at Anfield where one fatal slip sent Demba Ba through to a gaping goal, the thought of that provokes the very same reaction but for very different reasons. Both moments equally important when bringing together a legacy, it’s easy to remember the good times, but sometimes harder to forgive the bad.
For all his talent Liverpool’s captain marvel had his detractors. One look at the Twittersphere whenever his name arises as a ‘trend’ and his lack of Premier League silverware, as if it wasn’t before, becomes wholly evident. But it’s not simply his failure to capture that elusive white whale, after all football is a team game he was merely the headline performer, at times during matches when things looked bleak his attempts to force play, his frantic style, sending Hollywood balls over the top and finding a fan in the fifth row became at best frustrating and at worst utterly infuriating. After years of being forced to constantly pull games out of the fire, it sometimes looks as though he’s forgotten how to play any other way.
For all this though I wouldn’t change a thing. While other stars of his time gathered together to form galaxies in various ports across the continent Gerrard remained with his first love, Merseyside’s very own Don Quixote as he tried, at times naively, to battle single handedly against the changing tide of European football with his archaic ideals of brining glory to the city he loved, rather than chasing it in far off lands (or London). Whether or not he was the best of his generation, to me, is inconsequential. The fact is the past 16 years he has been the player Liverpool needed more than any other, the one that would fight to the last for the badge that is etched across his heart, and who was, and still is, always able to drag the ageing giant back in to the fight.
Eventually though, as the saying goes, all good thing must come to an end, an end which we are rapidly approaching. For a player who showed class throughout his career, the announcement of his impending departure was no different. It would have been easy to take snipes at Brendan Rodgers or kick up a fuss about wages or playing time or whatever the reason is for his sudden epiphany on how he should spend the twilight of his career, but there was none of that.
The decision to leave was, hopefully, his and his alone, he has earned that right. As supporters we simply have to move on. Steven Gerrard was far from perfect during his time with Liverpool, mere mortals seldom are, but as memories and in depth analysis of every performance become clouded in to the distant past what we will be left with is collection of perfect, priceless and unforgettable moments. Thanks for everything Stevie la.
