Stevie was special, the kid had the lot

There’s a way to write about this rationally and without sentiment.

Yeah, right…

The greatest Liverpool player of the modern era has decided to go. Not immediately, of course. Only sensible clubs do these things the right way, unlike borderline lunatic asylums. Steven Gerrard has taken his decision now “so the manager and the team are not distracted by stories or speculation about my future” … that’s almost sweet in its complete naivety. Let the torrent of nonsense gush forth.

All legends must have an ending. If you get to decide how you leave the stage, all well and good, but even when there’s more than a hint of tragedy or lack of ultimate fulfilment that’s a story well worth telling too.

There have been other Liverpool players who ended their careers without adding a league winner’s medal to their tally, but none who seemed to carry the burden quite as much as Gerrard did.

You can cite the squandering of hundreds of millions of pounds on footballers not fit to lace the boots of someone we got for absolutely nothing but that will be ignored by many who will see it as Steven Gerrard’s failure.

That is probably, bafflingly, how he sees it too.

His place in the Anfield pantheon was already assured. Play that brilliantly for that long and it would be a pretty ungrateful bunch that didn’t carry him from the ground on their shoulders whilst thanking him profusely, even obsequiously.

From the earliest glimpses there was something special. Reds author John Williams spoke of secret friendlies where the young Huyton boy would be whisked in and mysteriously whisked out again, in case Ferguson’s spies were snooping as they were rumoured to be for Michael Owen.

In a few years it was already unbelievable what we were seeing. The kid had the lot. He was as dynamic as Emlyn and could pass and shoot like Graeme. He wasn’t averse to putting his boot in either. When Gerard Houllier received a death threat, from the sort of fan y’know really cares, Gerrard’s next goal celebration took him in a 50 yard sprint towards the man that guided him throughout his early career.

That was also the year he became Liverpool’s “top boy”. It had always been Michael Owen before that. Gerrard accentuated the changing of the guard by signing the new contract that Owen slyly delayed and delayed until moving to Madrid for a rank, scandalous eight million.

If he had subsequently taken the Chelsea rouble and thrown his lot in with the Spesh (a thought that has just crept along my spine like an arthritic slug), Liverpool would at least have been well compensated. We will probably learn all the facts in a tell-all end-of-career blockbuster autobiography in a few years’ time. He may even decide to print the legend; the Liverpool lad that could not be torn from home. As cynical as some of us can be, we’d be more than happy to leave it at that.

That decision won him the greatest moment of his life. It’s probably yours as well. Even back in Istanbul there was something paradoxical about him. Selected as a normal central midfielder for the first-half, he pretty much got torn apart. Dispatched further forward to rescue a lost cause he became the Colossus we know and love. That debate over what he thought he was and what his manager wanted (and we don’t just mean ‘Benitez’ here) has never relented. It’s been gathering momentum this season too. It’s alright to say “look at Lampard” but did you seriously expect Gerrard to accept such a bitty part? I didn’t.

Anyway, the dynamic attacking marauder is the image most fans will carry with them. Blasting from outside the area to keep the European run going against Olympiakos, steaming into Milan’s area to win the equalising penalty (well, you know what I mean!) and another rocket from distance to break West Ham’s hearts a year later. There was an entire season playing just behind Fernando Torres and wreaking havoc against every team he faced. He was especially cruel towards Everton, knowing instinctively twisting that particular knife never gets old.

He has inspired an awful lot of terrace chants, not all of them from Liverpool fans and not all of them complimentary or printable. Some are downright scandalous in fact. Still, as some writer or other once said, there are worse things than being talked about.

It all went a bit pear-shaped in the ‘new’ decade. The club’s trials and tribulations seemed to affect him most of all. Contrary to the accepted image of carrying Liverpool and a constant assortment of deadbeats on his back, his best football has always been played with exceptional individuals around him.

The loss of people such as Owen, Alonso, Mascherano, Torres and Suarez always seemed to affect his game far more than he will ever admit. Does that make him less of a captain as a result? It’d take a sadist to say so. His leadership was always that of a warrior leading the charge. Dragging others off the dirt they preferred to crawl upon was never his style.

We can safely ignore this season, the one before it will unofficially become his last. There were still disputes about where he should play. Kinder souls pretended that he could play ‘deep’ for years and years and years. It’s almost as if all of the great things he’d ever done were not enough. That’s the Liverpool/Premier League cloud for you, I suppose.

It’s also how the truly great players think. What they’ve done is never enough, but there is no footballer who ever conquered time. I’ll leave the amateur psychiatrists to their evaluations of the damage from the infamous slip against Chelsea. Any team that wins 48 points from New Year’s Day to the end of the season might reasonably be expected to believe it did all it could.

The latest indignity might be the backbreaking straw. Absent from the Swansea walloping, present during the Leicester debacle. QED, some said. More could have been said about the use of his talents but the fact it was even being said at all can’t have helped. When he’s finally gone, don’t be expecting to see anything like him again. They don’t make Liverpool players that way anymore. You knew the day would come. Preparing for it, now that’s another matter.

* Liverpool fan Steven Kelly writes a weekly Terrace Talk column for The Irish Examiner