Steven Gerrard has just scored his 100th goal for Liverpool, late in their Champions League win over PSV Eindhoven, and it was a beauty, a blistering 30-yard free kick that somehow hit the top corner of the net after spending ninety percent of its flight path roughly two and a half feet above the ground.
What’s the legend of Steven Gerrard at this point? Is he the guy who comes up big in big games? The hometown boy made good? The king of dramatic endings? The loyal servant of Liverpool? The inspirational leader who carries his team on his back? Maybe I’m just overloaded on politics lately and poisoned with the concept of “on-message,” but it seems like there’s been a quiet backlash at work against Gerrard for some time now, and I wonder if it’s partly because there are so many narratives thrown out about his legacy that he’s started to seem inaccessible.
It’s obviously to his credit that he’s opened up so many possible routes to admiration, and taken together they more than make his case. At the same time, though, it’s as if he can’t quite live up to any one of them completely—can’t be the big-game star after his poor play for England, can’t be the local hero after the near-defections to Chelsea—and so from any one angle he seems slightly disappointing, when it ought to be impressive enough that he’s 85% convincing in so many starring roles.
Just a thought, and maybe it’s ultimately just Al Gore in earth tones, but if I were selling Steven Gerrard like a presidential candidate or a Macintosh I might try to get the public to focus on one aspect of his career—probably the dramatic late winners—and let the others radiate from that.
YOUTUBE UPDATE: Enjoy it while it lasts. (Okay, the ball doesn’t quite hit the top corner, but I was writing without having seen a replay. It’s all just Twitter around here. I mean, nobody’s responsible for anything.)
Read More: Liverpool, Steven Gerrard
by Brian Phillips · October 1, 2008
Sustained success is the missing ingredient, I feel. His form has been erratic too in the last year or so.
I think things went pear-shaped for poor old Gerrard after one Chelsea-summer-transfer-go-about too many…that said, he’s a bit of a blank slate.
A friend of mine pointed out he only smiles after he scores goals, and then in the interviews he’s just all “you know, we’ve got to play better as a team for our fans.”
Noise. Maybe he needs to star in a self-deprecating ad or two — Apple Computers maybe?
He’s completely unlikeable without being substantive enough to inspire real enmity.
The boy has become a man and has really started maturing as a player this season.
His all round game has improved in leaps and bounds thanks to a new found sense of discipline.
He does seem more disciplined this year, but I also agree with the “blank slate” assessment. He seems to have less joy and more grim resolve every year, at least up until the moment when he’s celebrating a goal (and even his celebrations have a weird anger in them sometimes, but that’s another story).
It seems like he’s fighting pressure more, although not necessarily losing to it.
I wonder if being so close to a move to Chelsea made him so determined to prove himself to Liverpool that he actually moved along the continuum from ‘team player’ closer towards ‘individualist’, if that’s not too simplistic a concept. Or at least the way that Liverpool games seem uncannily to come down to whether Gerrard can impose his will on the opposition is not necessarily a demonstration of a rampant desire to be The Man for its own sake, but because he feels that, on some level, the bond between him and the fans was badly damaged and he is desperate to repair it.
Or, he is a egotist hell-bent on world domination. I’m not quite sure.
Either way, perhaps his extraordinary drive is now beginning to be harnessed properly, which bodes well for Liverpool.