Celtic Fans Were Not Goaded By Gerrard Yesterday. He Was Goading Himself.
When Steven Gerrard looks back on his career, how much satisfaction will he take from it? A little? A lot? Yesterday he lamely and pathetically attempted to hijack the Legends event at Anfield by goading our fans every chance he got.
To what end except to feed his own ego? It did nothing for a half decent atmosphere.
He doubtless thinks the day was a triumph.
But that’s rather the point I’m making. Gerrard has always been at the centre of his own legend, and that’s why he judges himself more harshly and horribly than any other person could.
What does he see when he looks back on his career so far?
Was his behaviour yesterday that of someone confident and self assured, even arrogant? Or someone struggling with regrets and pondering the choices that he has made?
Who decides whether someone is rated as a success or a failure? Would football scholars?
Certainly he was a tremendously accomplished footballer, winning trophies and caps and with a Champions League winners medal in his cabinet. But Paul Lambert does as well, and so it’s all relative. Tuchel won one as Chelsea boss and still got sacked.
The two things Gerrard wanted most in the world was, first, to win the title as a Liverpool player and for the rest of his life people will remind him that he might have done so … except for his own mistake. His own mistake.
That’s a life-time of soul searching and pain and self doubt right there.
He will never get over it.
His second ambition, when he quit playing, was to have been at Anfield in some capacity when the 30 year run without a title finally came to an end.
And he missed out on that experience. He played no role in the winning of that championship, and he knows that as well. Where was he when that history was being made? Having his backside handed to him in Scotland by us.
That’s another regret that will never leave him.
Liverpool fans are entitled to wonder why their club only reached that peak when he was no longer there. Not just no longer on the park but no longer in the building at all.
But then, their questions about him go back much further than that and their doubts have more to coalesce around than just his being absent from the campaign where they finally reached the summit.
It’s a well known fact that he would have left Anfield well before he did and that the only reason he didn’t was because he didn’t want them to think less of him. Mark that and think on it a while.
A purely selfish motive. He wanted to remain a hero in their eyes and he knew that if he pursued the money and the glory in London that he would tarnish his image.
He did use that period to basically blackmail the club into upping his contract though, making it clear that Gerrard was the first love of his life and money the second. Liverpool, as a city, as a club … who knows where they actually ranked in his concerns?
If we say that a man is judged by the company he keeps then what to say there except that his choice of friends was particularly gruesome and should, on its own, have buried him.
Notorious gangsters flitted in and out of his orbit.
Did he gravitate towards them or they to him? What does it matter when the result is the same anyway; he was comfortable with them and they with him, ignoring the ghastly damage they did to the neighbourhoods thousands of his fans came from.
His decision to leave Liverpool when they were on the cusp of ending that 30 year wait would have been odd enough, and telling, without his choice of club leaving many Liverpool fans open-mouthed in horror and utter disbelief.
The monarchist imperialist establishment club, profoundly anti-Catholic. And what must his wife have thought after christening their daughter Lourdes? No wonder she chose to base herself down south, miles away from any of it.
One day he will have to explain that to his girl, and where do you even start?
“Oh it was just a job?”
The same excuse his gangster pals doubtless gave to their loved ones, lawyers and yes their victims.
One of the notorious fall-backs of scoundrels and scumbags everywhere.
But no-one enters Ibrox and stays for any length of time without leaving profoundly altered by the experience, and let’s face it, we’re talking here about a guy who made the Piltdown Man look like a Harvard don.
The ethos of Ibrox is designed for gullible, pliable susceptible fools and especially those who already have one toe on the dark side of the street.
He fell headfirst into it all, and he was tainted by it and he knows that he was and those around him know that he was as well, whether they will say it to his face or not. We saw how deeply ingrained in him it is yesterday.
We’ve played against ex-Ibrox players before in these games and gave them a bit of stick without them resorting to that sort of nonsense. In a friendly game. It wasn’t only attention seeking, dark narcissism sweeping aside his common sense … this is who he is now, after spending three seasons in that building swamped in its lunacy and hatred.
His record there is one trophy in nine attempts.
It was an important one.
But the Champions League is an important one too and I bet he would trade his medal for an EPL league winners one.
And he didn’t even get to properly enjoy his triumph as COVID snatched away from him the open top bus parade I’m sure their club would have demanded.
It was someone else – Van Bronckhorst – who did something really big in that job.
The No Fans Title would have vanished into nothingness had Ramsey not missed the penalty, and been seen for exactly what it was; something that was a product of exceptional circumstances and gross failures at Celtic Park.
So he has been doubly lucky in that regard … but successful?
It got him his move to England as a manager, another step, as some saw it, on the road back to Anfield as manager.
Well how did that story end?
With a move to Villa, where he lasted less than a year.
Who wants him in the dugout next?
There is no clamour for his services, in spite of the drip-drip of stories in the papers, most of them, like the PSG story, absolutely absurd and the kind of thing Ricky Gervais was spoofing in the famous Les Dennis episode of Extras where it’s the comedian himself who calls gossip columnists pretending to be other people, and feeding them stories designed to make him look good.
He dreams of a return to Anfield. This is known.
But right now he has a better chance of a gig on LiverpoolTV than he does of landing a job on the coaching staff, and anything other than the big seat is a step down anyway and it would crush him to face that.
So of course he struts around in front of the Celtic support, this man who has never realised the ambitions he had for himself and who must have sleepless nights wondering about the one league title he is responsible for, the one bookended by nine Celtic titles and two and counting … it would make even the most self assured guy wonder whether something other than his own skills were responsible for that. And what price that “success” anyway?
The Mooch is busily claiming that as his own, and our media is going along for the ride.
The title King told him would collapse us like a house of cards has come, has gone, and we’re stronger than ever … so how do you really judge his time at Ibrox? Successful?
The attack on Pearl Harbour was successful, taken in isolation, as a single military operation.
And what was it Yamamoto said about that? “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve …”
Oh you had better believe it mate.
What sparked his reaction yesterday?
The chants from our fans about him being an “orange bastard”, which is a term a lot of folk find distasteful and even worthy of sanctions.
Still, what was that to him but a reminder of how he betrayed his background, his family, his city and many supporters of the club he loves by hitching his star to the sectarian supremacists of Govan and in doing so, at the same time, took him away from Anfield at the precise momnet that club was on the brink of laying its ghosts – his ghosts – to rest?
In his shoes I’d hate us too.
But believe me, he hates himself more.
He goaded us yesterday to get a reaction but in doing so he already had the reaction from the one guy who can needle him more than anybody else; himself.
He is a tortured soul … and he deserves to be.