Liverpool losing ‘an incredible icon’ as Steven Gerrard walks away

http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2015/may/15/liverpool-steven-gerrard-walks-away

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Of the 14 questions put to Brendan Rodgers on Friday about Steven Gerrard’s leaving of Liverpool, 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.

Gérard Houllier will be among the crowd for Gerrard’s 354th and final Anfield appearance against Crystal Palace on Saturday 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. “Stay out of nightclubs now and you can buy one when you finish playing,” said Houllier, unaware at the time that Gerrard’s loss of focus stemmed from his parents’ divorce. He may not own the nightclub, and certainly wishes he had avoided a few more in the intervening years, but as he prepares to head off to a mansion on the California coast with 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. Everyone who has covered Gerrard and his repeated acts of escapology will have resorted at some point to a superhero analogy, and a superhero is never without flaws.

The greatest void, however, awaits Liverpool. “I asked my staff to describe Steven in one word and they said things like ‘genuine’ and ‘quality,’” said Rodgers. “The word I would use is ‘Liverpool’. Not just Liverpool as a football club but Liverpool as a city.

“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.”

Liverpool and Rodgers have had time and reason 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.

Against Basel in December, with Liverpool needing victory 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.

Liverpool should be adding experience and character to a young team that has fallen short at crucial moments, not letting it ebb away, although that is the inevitable consequence of a transfer strategy that focuses on potential while personalities such as Gerrard, Luis Suárez and Jamie Carragher move on. Balance is essential but the scales appear to be tilted one way at Anfield.

Gerrard’s absence will be acutely felt off the pitch. Even with the legs tiring, he retains a status at Liverpool that no one around the first team can rival. After 17 years and a lifelong allegiance to the club, he knows the standards required. He sets them. It is when he walks into the changing room that the jokes stop and the jokers listen. “He sets the lead every day,” Rodgers admitted on Friday. “He never has a lazy day. His mind never wanders far from performing well every single day. He gives his maximum in every session and that drip-feeds through into the other players.”

It is not only at Melwood where Gerrard’s captaincy carries weight. Once, on a flight to a Champions League away game, he overheard a stewardess telling a colleague she had had little time to attract sponsorship for a charity mountain trek she had committed to. Gerrard asked how to use the PA system on the plane, stood up and asked everyone on board to put their hands in their pockets for the stewardess’s chosen charity. We all complied. A few months earlier he had walked up and down the aisle of the same plane placing the European Cup on passengers’ heads.

The phrase “a symbol of Liverpool” has been used frequently ahead of Gerrard’s final game on home soil and it will no doubt have occurred to Fenway Sports Group that they will lack one as the owner pushes the club as a global brand for commercial profit. Gerrard’s No8 shirt remains by far the biggest seller in Liverpool stores around the world. Rodgers claims he is unafraid of the void Gerrard’s departure will create, although he accepted Liverpool’s big-game mentality was open to question following last month’s FA Cup semi-final defeat by Aston Villa.

“It is going to prove an opportunity for a number of players now to step up,” said the Liverpool manager. “I think for so many years Steven has been the go-to man, not just for this group but for a whole raft of players. This will provide the opportunity for others to show leadership qualities. That’s something I’m looking forward to. Let’s not forget we have won games when Steven has not been playing and won some big games.

“There is absolutely no doubt with the respect that he has, one because of the level of player he is and the other because of his behaviour, that respect he has carried in the changing room will be missed. But that has shown others the standard you are held at when you are a world-class player. It is an opportunity for the young players to show they can take on the mantle.”

The argument that Gerrard has plenty left to offer Liverpool is watertight, although it is not accurate to say the club could have retained his services and integrated him on to the coaching staff as Manchester United have done with Ryan Giggs.

He has made it plain he could not adapt to a reduced playing role for a team he has often carried over 17 years and the reality, as Gerrard put it this week, “is that I’m getting too old for this level”. He deserves admiration for refusing to quit completely, and will relish the relative anonymity of life in Los Angeles after the unforgiving goldfish bowl of Liverpool.

His career has been one of glorious highs and painful lows but adulation for a player that many rank as the finest in Liverpool’s illustrious history has not transformed Gerrard, who bids farewell to Anfield in the same week the Hillsborough inquest heard horrific details of the death of his 10-year-old cousin, Jon-Paul Gilhooley, in the 1989 disaster.

Gerrard has never been comfortable in the spotlight, dating back to his breakthrough season at Liverpool when he thanked a journalist for naming him man of the match in the Daily Post newspaper. “But you don’t have to do it every week,” he added. “It’s getting embarrassing.”