da gbg bet： Steven Gerrard never won a league winner’s medal, and that wasn’t all he didn’t win throughout his illustrious career. Like every England player since 1966, he never won a major international tournament.
da doce： Back in January 2015 – when Gerrard was still a Liverpool player, but when he was being left out of the team more and more regularly – the then-Liverpool captain said that he wished he’d met Brendan Rodgers a decade earlier, as that way he’d have won more titles.
The quotes came at a time when Rodgers was hardly on a high ebb in his Liverpool tenure. Just six months previously, the Irishman had guided Liverpool to an impressive second place in the Premier League, and inches from the title itself. By January, he was out of the Champions League and had ground to make up to finish in the top four. Too much ground, as it turned out.
But although Gerrard’s comments could well be put down to a club legend backing his manager, he might have had a serious point, too.
By the time Rodgers entered the club, Gerrard was already on his decline. His game had always been about energy: not just his ability to arrive late in the box or get up and down the pitch, but also his ability to energise his own team, seemingly inspiring them to victory from impossible situations. Rodgers’ solution to the England legend’s older limbs was to drop him deeper in the midfield, in a position where his job would be to launch his side’s attacks.
The deep-lying playmaker role wasn’t really one the captain was used to. For one thing, it hadn’t really featured in English football during Gerrard’s playing career. He was used to playing alongside one other midfield player in a 4-4-2, and even when Liverpool did play with the kind of player who excelled in that deeper role, it was Xabi Alonso, not Gerrard, whose job wasn’t to spray passes but to link up with the attack.
But who knows what would have happened if Gerrard had been used in such a situation sooner? If he’d played that role earlier in his career, he certainly would have been much more adept at playing there by the end, and whilst Gerrard was never the best passer of the football, that might well have stemmed from the fact that his game was based around other things for most of his career.
What’s interesting, though, isn’t whether or not he’d have played well in that role, it’s how English football would have changed if that had happened.
Instead of Steven Gerrard, the box to box wonder, we might have had Gerrard the more considered ball-player. That might have opened up England’s midfield at a time when it was stuck to a rigid formation and manager after manager tried to shoehorn unsuitable players into it. There may have been no debate about whether to play Gerrard and Lampard in the same midfield. Paul Scholes may even have been allowed to play in a central position in a midfield three instead of rotting on the left wing, a move which probably would have stopped him retiring from international duty just after the 2004 European Championships.
In the end, though, if there’s any truth in Gerrard’s lament about not meeting Rodgers a decade earlier, it’s less about Gerrard and more about English football.
If Gerrard had developed under Rodgers, who knows what would have happened. But if English football had been willing to use its best players in more inventive formations, then the golden generation of English footballers around the turn of the millennium might well have won a World Cup.
In the end, the sea change came too late, but it’s a lesson worth learning: don’t be afraid to get inventive in order to use your best players to their full potential. And don’t be left wondering what might have been if you’d done it ten years earlier.
[ad_pod id=’playwire’ align=’center’]