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It’s the 80th minute. Everton and Liverpool are locked in a lackluster battle, and if any Merseyside Derby can be called lackluster it’s this one. But something’s got to give. There’s going to be a wild finish. You can feel it.
In my head, I saw it going something like this: Romelu Lukaku bullies his way past and overmatched Joe Allen and finishes before Skrtel can get to him. But just minutes later Gerrard finds a streaking Daniel Sturridge behind the defense and Sturridge knots everything up. The game goes into extra time. Four minutes to sneak away with all three points. Gerrard looks for Sturridge again, but Sturridge gets taken out just outside the box. Free kick Liverpool, and everyone in the stadium knows who’s taking it.
The announcer’s commentary imagined:
“Here’s Gerrard, and it’s got to be him for this one. One last chance to be the villain for the Everton faithful. Here’s the kick AND IT’S AROUND THE WALL AND IN! Steven Gerrard rips Everton’s heart out one last time in Goodison with a superb free kick! Vintage Gerrard in his last Merseyside Derby. We will not be seeing the likes of him for a good long while. What a strike from the Liverpool captain. Really it had to be him, didn’t it? Liverpool’s hero came through right when they needed him. Sometimes it seems like he always does.”
But that’s not what happened.
Some endings are just endings. Not everything can be a fairytale, no matter how much we would like for that to be the case.
Watching Steven Gerrard slog his way ‘round the pitch in his last Merseyside Derby was hard. It’s never easy to see a favorite player get old, to gradually lose his legs, to watch the gifts that once made him great cruelly wrested from him by father time. This happens to all players, sure, but when a player looms larger than life like Gerrard in his prime, it can be hard to remember that.
The fire is the last thing to go. Footballers are slaves to their competitive drives, which makes them blind to the harsh realities of aging.
The fire is not gone from Steven Gerrard, but it’s dwindling. You can see it in his movements. Sure he’s (comparatively) old and slow - after all, he was never a racehorse on the pitch. But there’s something missing from him, and it’s been missing from the whole Liverpool team all year: it’s that fire.
I honestly believe that had he not slipped against Chelsea last year, we would have already seen the last of Steven Gerrard in a Liverpool uniform. And I think that the emotional toll last season took on him has made this season a drag. His epic “we go again” speech will not have a sequel.
Sure, there are moments when the old Steven Gerrard appears from out of the fog and wows everybody, but he simply doesn’t have the energy to be as amped as he needs to be as the leader of this team.
He should have gone nuts against Everton, but instead he went about his business, sort of affecting the game but not really. He certainly wasn’t a negative. He is Steven Gerrard, after all, but he wasn’t who Liverpool needed him to be. Liverpool don’t need Gerrard to be an above-average Premier League center mid. They need him to be Steven f@#*ing Gerrard.
He’s just not that person anymore.
Gerrard has scored 10 goals against Everton in his career. I really wanted him to end his derby career with number 11, or at least something that showed the real Stevie G was still in there somewhere. That’s not what I got. And it’s given me a bad taste in my mouth.
You know what? Screw it. Maybe they’ll see each other in the Europa League. Also, watch this video to be cheered up about Gerrard:
@SamKlomhaus
