Moving away: The red of Liverpool will forever run in Gerrard’s veins

The Kop favourite may join any club but he will never be able to leave Anfield behind

KARACHI: When Steven Gerrard scored Liverpool’s third goal in a 4-1 win over Sheffield Wednesday on December 5, 1999 — slaloming his way past several defenders before slotting it into the bottom corner for his first ever senior goal — very few in the Kop would have predicted what this 19-year-old would go on to represent for them.

Gerrard struggled in his first two years at the club and later admitted that he was ‘out of depths’ in those early years, often suffering from nerves in the limited game-time that he was afforded.

But the weak and ungainly midfielder soon transformed himself into one of the best box-to-box midfielders in the country; going head on against the likes of Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira.

Liverpool did the league double in the 2000-01 season as Gerrard scored 10 goals in his breakthrough season. In October of 2003, just two years later, Gerrard donned the captain’s armband.

But the pinnacle of his time at Liverpool was surely the 2004-05 Champions League campaign.

Almost exactly five years to the day of his first goal in Liverpool colours, Gerrard scored an even more memorable strike when he hammered a volley into the back of the net in the dying embers of the match against Olympiakos to send Liverpool through. Anfield went into raptures and it was then that its young captain ensured his place in the history of the storied stadium. But the story was not yet finished.

Liverpool made their way into the final courtesy of a 1-0 aggregate win over Chelsea in the semis but found themselves 3-0 down against AC Milan in the final at halftime in Istanbul.

The Rossoneri faithful were already celebrating but Liverpool’s captain was not to be denied. Nine minutes into the second half, his looping header beat Dida to make it 3-1. One of football’s most iconic celebrations followed as the skipper — in a moment of sheer passion, unbridled and unrestrained — waved his arms up and down to egg on Liverpool; players and fans alike. They responded. In six minutes, The Reds went from 3-0 down to 3-3. And when Jerzy Dudek saved Andriy Shevchenko’s effort in the shootout, the miracle of Istanbul was complete.

And so, just five days before his 25^th birthday, Gerrard lifted Liverpool’s fifth Champions League trophy and hence brought it back home to Anfield permanently, where it stands on display to this day as testimony to how far that nervous teenager had come.

Gerrard then scored from more than 30 yards out in the 2006 FA Cup final next season against West Ham to equalise at 3-3 with almost the last kick of the match, before lifting the cup 3-1 on penalties. The match would go on to be remembered as ‘The Gerrard Final’.

For more than 15 years, Gerrard inspired The Reds to one achievement after another but never to the Premier League title, missing out agonisingly more than once. But for that glorious decade-and-a-half, Gerrard inspired and mesmerised an entire generation; a whirlwind of a player with a heart almost as big as his talent and for that he will always be remembered with respect by both opponents and teammates.

“To me, Gerrard is Keane,” Sir Alex Furgeson once famously said, comparing the Liverpool man to his own captain.

Middlesbrough captain Gareth Southgate also revealed the awe that his side felt after facing a Gerrard-inspired side. “Gerrard was awesome today,” he said. “We were just laughing in the dressing room that at one stage we thought he was heading his own crosses in.”

But genius the likes of which Gerrard possessed does not go unnoticed in football and the Liverpool legend earned the admiration of Chelsea and Real Madrid among others during his heyday, only to turn them down; preferring to stay at his beloved Anfield. “I have had a couple of options through my career to go to Real Madrid but I resisted temptation because of the feeling I had for my hometown club,” the skipper had said earlier this year. “It might be something I regret down the line for not challenging myself and experiencing another country but I would have had an even bigger regret leaving Liverpool. I had a great admiration for Madrid but for me Liverpool is my number one club.”

Past his best and struggling to keep up with the pace of the league on his aging legs, Gerrard is now set to end his time at his ‘number one club’ and will walk away from the ground where he never walked alone but often had to do it all by himself.

He will leave having given it his all, heavy with the burden of the fateful slip that cost him his best shot at the elusive Premier League medal last year, going down in Anfield’s folklore as one of its most beloved sons.

Come 2015-16, Gerrard would have left for pastures new. And while they may be greener, his heart will forever search for the red of Anfield.

 

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