Steven Gerrard: Destroyer of Worlds

In trademark running, pointing and shouting pose

He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong. 

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood. 
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

It is hard, in the face of a laughably hyperbolic media, to judge the demise of Steven Gerrard with anything approaching objectivity. In a post-Diana Britain it has become the norm to lament beyond sense, to give in to nostalgia over reason. To read the sports news of late has been to imagine a nation howling in the street, throwing roses to the pavement as its last titan of the game passes into legend. The people’s midfielder: England’s Rose. It is tempting, and common, to react to such hyperbole with denigration; to suggest Gerrard was merely good, not great. Indeed, it is hard for me to attempt to judge the merit of a man I have long despised as captain of my most hated team, just as I struggle to use logic in the midst of my love when evaluating the talents of Michael Carrick. But someone, possibly God, once said ‘love your enemies’. If I cannot quite bring myself to agree with the big man on that, I can certainly try to put my feelings aside momentarily. To write about a player who may not have been the greatest English midfielder, but is almost certainly the greatest ‘English midfielder’.

Because that, to me, is Gerrard’s greatest legacy. In a world of tactical nuance and technical marvel, he stood alone as the last bastion of the old-school midfielder. Pulling his socks up, barking his commands and bestriding the pitch with blood and thunder, he dragged lesser men to greatness. He ran, and kicked, and pointed, and shouted. He epitomised our country’s approach to the game: making up for a paucity of discipline and awareness with a surfeit of courage and belief. And if that seems to be damning with faint praise, it is meant to be far from it. Steven Gerrard was perhaps the most effective midfield player I have ever witnessed. At his peak he would charge through teams, carving them open through power not poise, inspiring those around him to unforeseen heights. He drove a laughably average Liverpool team to the Champions League final, and once there electrified the most implausible of comebacks. If Scholes was our most gifted midfielder since Gascoigne, and Lampard the most ruthless since Charlton, then Gerrard was an entity unto himself. One part Beckham to two parts Robson, he looked at times if he should have been playing in a bygone age of black and white. And in a World where diminutive geniuses like Modric and Iniesta now rule, there was something secretly thrilling about the directness and simplicity he came to represent.

For in so many ways, Gerrard’s ascent to the peak of the game is remarkable due to his shortcomings. His transition to a deep-lying midfielder showed his technical and positional deficiencies. As his radar diminished and he sent more and more passes and shots into the crowd we realised his discipline was questionable at best. He had no tricks, no great vision, no magic or mystique; yet he grew to, for a short while, the most effective attacking midfielder player in the World. The greatest player alive not touched by genius, far from complete yet staggeringly brilliant. If to deploy Pirlo or Scholes is to fix a washing machine by pouring over its manual, then to use Gerrard is to repeatedly smash it with a hammer and hope. It may not work every time, but there is something satisfyingly artless to watching the carnage unfold.

Gerrard has suffered and benefitted from being born in the age he was, and compared to contemporary talents at home and abroad. If Scholes was a sniper puffing his cigarette in the dark and pulling off quiet kill after quiet kill, Gerrard was quite the opposite. He was the British Tommy in the trenches, loading his mortar with no real regard for aim or subtlety, blowing up friend and foe alike in a crescendo of carnage. This made him thrilling in his uniqueness, but is also pointed to the problems which dogged his later career. Scholes, Pirlo and Xabi Alonso relied on the sort of peerless technique which marked them for longevity. Gerrard, his game based on physicality and running, could never hope for the same twilight to his career, yet was almost demanded to provide it. There is no shame in burning brightly but briefly, yet his reputation has suffered as it has become clearer and clearer that he doesn’t have the skillset to make the transition to his game that modern football almost expects of central midfielders. I remember him being labelled the G-Force by the media in the run up to the 2006 World Cup. And in many ways viewing Gerrard as a force of nature is apt. Because, as Isaac Newton would say in the studio alongside Robbie Savage, forces diminish over time and in the face of resistance. Gerrard is not Pirlo, even with his continental beard. He is a colossus in the mould of Toure, Keane or Vieira; to be judged by the height of his peak, not the rapidity of his decline.

And what a peak it was. From 2004 to 2009 Gerrard was unmatched in his ruthless effectiveness. There was the Miracle of Istanbul, of course, and the 4-0 humbling of Real Madrid in 2009, but it was the 2006 FA Cup final that will always define him as a player. I have written before about the fallacy of the one man team, but Gerrard’s performance in that match almost single-handedly proves me wrong. Admittedly he was ably supported by Alonso, Carragher and Reina, but Gerrard was other-worldly in that game. It was possibly the finest individual performance I have ever witnessed, as he shouldered his side and drove them to victory, making tackle after tackle, pass after pass and scoring the most Gerrard-esque sensational goal of his career. He ran, he shouted, he kicked the ball hard and he pointed a lot. And he did it like no-one else in the World could.

And that is how I will remember Gerrard the player. I don’t like him, I hate his team and I will always unfairly begrudge him for the early international retirement of Paul Scholes, born with a far more ethereal, and underappreciated, talent. I will laugh at his 46 second red card and watch over and over his backpass to Demba Ba. Yet I know that he was undeniably a majestic player. He was, as Mourinho put it recently, the best of enemies, inspiring my hate precisely because of his brilliance. Liverpool will have greater players than him, and England most certainly will, but there will never be, in so many ways, another Steven Gerrard. So I may not mourn, and I most certainly won’t clap, but deep down below the Manchester United crest over my heart I will feel a twang of sadness at his departure. There really is no higher praise I can offer than that.