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Steven gerrard football story
Steven gerrard football story







Gerrard was mangled through those Golden years, when football struggled to retain some part of itself. All good managers are driven by a wound of some kind. Or is it? If the comic book film franchise era tells us anything it is that origin stories are your power source, the key to your ultimate fate. Villa play fewer long passes and press much harder in deep areas. Goals against, xG against, shots against: all have been reined in. His first acts at Villa have been about tightening up and adding resistance. In their title-winning season his Rangers team conceded 13 goals in 38 games.

steven gerrard football story

Gerrard the manager is something else modern, controlled and defensively disciplined.

steven gerrard football story

Looking back he seems in those early years to reduce down to a single galloping pair of legs: all radical energy, stanchion-clanging drives, slaloming, pond-skater dribbles, footballing third eye prised wide open. The young Gerrard was a wonderful thing, explosively brilliant even in his defensive work, and in a way that is oddly outmoded now. The most interesting part is just how different, how ideologically opposed he is to Gerrard the player. Certainly, Gerrard has turned out to be a compelling prospect as a manager. Audition that with your inherited mid-season Aston Villa.Ġ0:40 Steven Gerrard is destined to manage Liverpool, insists Jürgen Klopp – videoĪnd yet, maybe it really is an audition, in the same way everything is to some degree. On Saturday afternoon he will field one of the great modern-day club teams, currently on a sublime run of six wins in 19 days, with 17 goals scored and Klopp snooded-up on the touchline radiating grizzled alpha-power, another surge of light and fury. Jürgen Klopp was already an elite coach when Liverpool hired him. But how could it be? Gerrard has only just become Villa manager, a huge job in itself. This is a long-winded way of getting round to Steven Gerrard, who returns to Anfield with Aston Villa on Saturday, and who might just turn out to be the most interesting graduate of a very distinct group.įirstly, Saturday is not an audition. And looking back, we never knew that much about them at all. Still a little frazzled and bruised, but oddly heroic too. It is a scar you can still catch a glimpse of now. Perhaps because of this, footballers of the time seemed giant scale, a selection of Easter Island heads – the good one, the love rat, the goon – and projector screens for our own feelings of love, need, envy, covetousness. We didn’t hear their voices much, and didn’t know what they thought in the way we do now. He is obsessed with football, and with winningĪnother key point of difference: the players were essentially mute. Gerrard has a wariness that translates into authority. The world can seem like a vicious place right now. They had – one of the biggest crimes of all – wives and girlfriends. They bought vellum-upholstered super cars and wore solid gold bowler hats and shoes made out of vintage parmesan cheese. Let’s see how they react.Īt its peak – World Cup 2006, the Baden-Baden Supremacy – there was a tendency to see footballers as an acme of fame-driven debauchery. Let’s give them no filters or protective layers or genuine guidance.

steven gerrard football story

Let’s throw money, fame and malevolent attention at these young men. For the players this was a kind of unplanned social experiment. I get a surge of this feeling, and a weird kind of familial tenderness, when I see players from the golden generation era in English men’s football: back when the world was young, when the Premier League seemed to offer up a voraciously hungry new frontier. It probably depends on your age and cultural obsessions how this manifests itself.









Steven gerrard football story