Stevie G’s year of woe

If it can ever be possible to feel something approaching pity for a mega-rich Premier League footballer who has won the Champions League, captained his country and been justly feted as one of the best players of his generation, then look no further than Steven Gerrard.

Even if Liverpool manage to restore some of their battered pride against Manchester United tomorrow, 2014 will go down as an annus horribilis for Gerrard, a year which began ripe with so much promise for club and country ending, instead, with nothing tangible to show for his efforts in the trophy cabinet, while his own role at his boyhood club – and, indeed, his very future at Anfield – is under more critical scrutiny than ever before.

When Liverpool travelled to Old Trafford last March, they did so as an old empire apparently on the rise again, Gerrard scoring twice from the spot as they brushed aside their struggling arch-rivals 3-0.