Steven Gerrard Is A Winner And That Makes Him A Winning Manager.
One of the most ridiculous of all the lies, and one of the hardest to sustain belief in over the medium term, is that Gerrard is a “natural winner” and that this translates automatically into some great talent in the dugout.
That this has been disproved on numerous occasions, that football is littered with the corpses of those who’ve shattered this myth, does not seem to matter.
Gerrard never actually won a Premiership title. Roy Keane won a bunch of them.
He too was heralded as a top candidate for management based on his career as a player, and there are few players in the history of these islands who ever led on the field the way he did and who was man enough and brave enough to go head to head with Ferguson himself.
Keane had all the ingredients Gerrard does and a few on top.
And Keane is a disaster area as a manager.
He is not the only one. The ex-Ibrox and England captain Terry Butcher was a natural born leader. His managerial tenure was dreadful. The game is full of guys who thought taking the step from leading on the pitch to leading off of it was a straightforward and easy progression. Most of them learn the hard way.
There are a slew of other skills which go into making a great manager, and we don’t know that Gerrard doesn’t have them all … but nor do the Sevco fans know that he has any of them.
Players, even if they are captains, can retreat from criticism … managers cannot. Players do not get sacked by clubs for the failures of those clubs. Managers do. Players cannot arbitrarily take decisions on the pitch which affect the outcome of games … they do what managers tell them.
Much has been made of Gerrard’s “on field leadership” than night in Turkey when Liverpool came back from the dead to win the Champions League; Gerrard was definitely magnificent that night, but the instructions which turned the game came from Benitez.
Even the goals Gerrard scored were actually masterminded on the touchline; it was Benitez decision to push him further forward that turned that tie. Gerrard did his bit … but within the scope of the manager’s plan.
Gerrard’s first season at Ibrox was a failure; don’t let anyone rewrite history on that. We won the three domestic trophies and he couldn’t stop us. The media is overjoyed at the start they’ve made to the season … that start includes losing to us.
Gerrard has yet to prove he can win when it really, really counts … that kind of pressure crushes a lot of managers. He has yet to be fully tested in this campaign … but it will come. And then we’ll see what he’s made of. For the record, I still don’t think he’ll last the season.