La La Land intrigue as Stevie ready to set sail
They must wait anxiously on Lamps, who will try to cement his place in Chelsea history by denying them a title, before taking up his next departmental secondment within the City multinational.
But Stevie, at least, looks in the bag. He will make his debut for LA Galaxy on July 17 against San Jose Earthquakes.
Guaranteed your game six months in advance – a more satisfactory arrangement then the one he will leave behind.
The mechanics of the two transfers chime and jar at the same time.
Lamps, the smooth careerist, winding down in the same clinical, clear-headed way he walks onto chances at the edge of the box. Yet now enmeshed in contractual confusion.
Stevie, bowing out in the kind of rolling emotional whirlwind that defined him; conflicted eyes drawn to one more romantic date with destiny. Yet somehow set for a clean, uncontroversial break.
Before Stevie goes, there will be the long, gruelling goodbye. But first, the hello. This week, the Lakers’ Kobe Bryant laid out the mat.
“Welcome to Los Angeles. Welcome to La La Land.”
There was hardly anyone more appropriate to assure Stevie he was making the right call, than a fading star whose increasingly singular efforts to carry his franchise look ever more futile.
In a great column on Grantland.com this week, Brian Phillips wrote that Bryant “made a team game look like a viable path to a life of chosen solitude” and called him “a strangely impersonal narcissist, like a general whose army happens to be deployed inside himself”.
He could almost have been writing about Gerrard who, as much as he has always been driven by the responsibility to return glory to a club and a city, often looked almost physically burdened – hunched run, agonised grimace – with the knowledge he was their best means of achieving it.
As Phillips also wrote of Bryant: “It was as if he had to keep the Amazon flowing with nothing but his own force of will.”
It seems clear now that it was Brendan Rodgers who decided first that Liverpool might flow more freely without Gerrard.
We have heard a lot of that beautiful phrase, straight from the HR experts, “managing his game-time” – probably a precursor to “rightsizing his minutes”.
Stevie has never taken kindly to his game-time being managed. When Gérard Houllier left him out against Everton in 1999, he fumed on the bench, then carried his grievance onto the pitch and into Kevin Campbell, earning a red card. He wasn’t quite able to put Liverpool’s best interests ahead of his fractured ego this week either, teasing that he’d have signed a contract had it been offered in the summer, while assuring us there is no blame, no anger towards the manager.
One of those hospital passes that could look, to generous eyes, like an unselfish layoff.
The big problem for Rodgers, as we embark on the great farewell tour, is not Stevie’s move to La La Land, it is the La La Land where he currently operates.
There was another excellent indication that Gerrard had made the correct decision last Monday when he bestrode Liverpool’s FA Cup tie against the kind of opponents he may come across in America.
But afterwards, a quite agitated Alan Shearer, the army inside him itching for a fight, argued that Stevie had underlined the folly of leaving him out against Real Madrid with this performance against AFC Wimbledon.
“He should be playing all the big games,” argued Shearer, which may not be the sort of time management Rodgers had in mind.
These La-La-Landians have decided now that Stevie’s destiny is an emotional exit on his 35th birthday in the FA Cup final.
For his own sake, Brendan will probably have to let him at it and hope for the best.
Of course, that’s another target Lamps will be calmly sizing up. Perhaps La La Land will finally have to choose between them.
A quintessential Andy Townsend ITV moment? What about the one, at the 2010 World Cup, when he swapped cheerful, jingoistic optimism about England’s chances for cheerful, jingoistic optimism about England’s linesman, Darren Cann. “The flag’s up. Look, nice positive signal.”
If Gary Neville has gained a reputation for pointing out, at times, what the layman mightn’t see, Andy’s stock-in-trade has been to tell him exactly the things he did see and then, mainly, to adjudicate if someone ought to be disappointed with that or whether, if anything, he hit it too well.
Now the end nears of a curious era, when for a long spell the first-choice terrestrial co-commentators on England matches were former Republic of Ireland internationals.
Of the pair, Lawro’s deadpan detachment allowed him straddle his dual nationality more comfortably. While Andy’s boyish relish made those big World Cup nights almost feel like the England career he never had. The same enthusiasm that set him apart from other men who tell us what we have just seen, such as Michael Owen.
But now, with his ITV career coming to an end, might it be time for Andy to come home, to get back in touch with his inner green alongside George or Trevor?
Not for me, Clive.
