I think Lampard is a naturally fitter guy, doesn't he hold the record for outfield appearances in a row? Gerrard and Lampard have always been box to box players, who rely heavily on there fitness levels. Neither have the technical ability of a Scholes to reinvent themselves as more of a deep lying playmaker who controls games.
Bit surprised he hasn't gone straight Into a coaching type role at LFC mind with the big lump of MLS cash on offer he wouldn't be turned down In the future I'm sure..
Disagree - Lampard spent most of career playing as an AM. He's had others doing his defensive work for him. More importantly, he's been managed a lot better.
Was offered a coaching role but he must obviously feel like he can still play week in week out. Fair play to him if that's what he wants but if LFC want to progress, he cannot be starting games.
Confirmed that he's going to the States. I wonder whether this means he'll spend most of the rest of the season on the bench?
Soccer Saturday... oundits t's talking about Gerrard. Merson, le tissier and Charlie Nicholas all saying that we'll miss him because he's our best player... Jeff stelling the only one had the balls to say is he really our best midfielder?! Theyre re all saying individually he's the best and possibly he might, but he doesn't for into the team the best which is the issue.
It should It shows the hunger is totally gone IMO Funny the likes of Koeman falling over to say there's a place here or there when the guy is clearly just after a pay day and a break
Reading Carra's comments on how Stevie was offered a coaching role but declined. Shows you that Stevie believes he can go onto play for a few more years. What I did find interesting is that he could return on a short term loan next Jan ala Lampard - which would be ridoculous.
What a load of miserable shysters you lot really are! The man has done more for LFC than most other players that we've ever had. He recognises that his time here is over but ensures that he can never be put into a position of trying to play against us. Then you lot start on about him wanting to do the best for himself and his family - he deserves a good pay day if its possible.
Gerrard has been our best player for most of his career but now his legs have tired. No one quite has every thing he had. Henderson has the energy, desire, fight, Coutinho has the passing and creativity, but no one has every thing he had. A young Gerrard was a luxury blend of Henderson and Coutinho's very best bits, with add true local passion. But the key members of our midfield are now Henderson and Coutinho.
Think that;s doing him a bit of a disservice to be honest I get what you mean but Gerrard's finishing, long range shooting is far superior to both as well. Coutinho is far better dribbler and taking on players than Gerrard ever was but helps when you play futsal from 4-14 year of age and that's the only way to play the game
Sorry Flappy but Henderson is and will never be in the same league as Gerrard. Coutinho's moves and style are totally different to Gerrard's at any stage of his career. As for Lampard, he never had to perform the same defensive duties as Gerrard and has never even had to envisage the same weight of expectation.
I never said he was... I said no one we have had what Gerrard had. Coutinho's passing range is the main thing I was getting at.
I never considered his shooting. I was foolish to let that slip my mind. Our whole squad seem poor there. Maybe Can will be our next ball blaster.
I really don't get this cynical, " last big pay day" business thrown at older players who move on when they're no longer able to hold down a first team place. He's a multi-millionaire, ffs, can't anyone get their head around the idea that he might just want to continue playing for the couple of years that he has left in him? As for him moving straight into a coaching role with us, the same thing applies- that would mean him coming off the pitch- something he obviously isn't ready for yet.
He is by far the most complete player I've ever seen. Not as good defensively as Vieira or Keane, not as technical as Scholes, as graceful as Zidane or as good a finisher as Lampard, but he was an absolute beast in his prime and could almost match all of the above. Difference was that he could almost match the above at the same time..because there was no real weakness in his game. I used to remember him busting a gut running back 60yards and perfectly timing a sliding challenge to stop an attack, or picking up a loose ball and charging forward through players to launch a counter attack. He was the big time player who changed and decided games wherever he player. Best ever player or midfielder is so subjective and doesn't take into account specialty positions or tactics, but without question for me, he was the best all round player I've seen play. It's a shame he's been ruined recently by poor management because he does still have a lot to offer a team. It's obvious to me that Rodgers hasn't got the bollocks to drop him which then lessens his performance levels through fatigue, then needs to drop him because of said performance levels and criticism of them. His pandering to Gerrard isn't helping anyone, least of all the team. He would have a great last 6 months as a bit part player (maybe every other game at the most but ideally as an impact sub) where he can sit up top just behind Sterling and alongside lallana and Coutinho - with Lucas and Henderson behind who work really well together. Unfortunately, I can only see Rodgers ruining the last 6 months and Gerrard leaving in the summer under a grey cloud... Let him go the MLS with our thanks. If he wants to earn some big money before he retires, so be it. He can get his coaching badges in the meantime and then see what happens then. He's not ready to coach yet anyway, certainly not ready to manage, and tbh, probably needs a break from being the icon of a club for a bit.
Decent piece, would argue a couple of points but some good ones in there too... http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2015/jan/02/steven-gerrard-liverpool-barney-ronay Steven Gerrard: an icon in Liverpool decline and a captivating figure please log in to view this image Barney Ronay The captain’s departure after 16 years will sever another thread connecting the club’s current team with its glorious past • Gérard Houllier: he is the standout player from my whole career • Gerrard: I will return to serve Liverpool again one day please log in to view this image Steven Gerrard scores in the 2005 Champions League final, his most inspirational campaign in a Liverpool shirt. Photograph: Eddie Keogh/Reuters Friday 2 January 201518.51 GMT Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email Share on LinkedIn Share on Google+ Shares 331 Comments 400 Farewell then, Steven Gerrard. It has been emotional – not to mention glorious, thrilling and, by the end of a 16-year Liverpool career of operatic highs and lows, a little blurred, a little rancorous and above all strangely hard to classify. The temptation, it seems, is to reach for the big soaring notes here – and with good reason. Nostalgia is an easy chord to twang away at but, with Gerrard set to leave at the end of the season, it does seem a bit as if a golden thread connecting Liverpool to their glorious past is about to be decisively severed. There is a kind of parlour game one can play here. When Gerrard made his debut Steve McManaman was still playing. McManaman made his debut in a team containing Ian Rush. Rush made his debut alongside Phil Neal. Neal played with Ian Callaghan, who replaced Billy Liddell, who made his own debut alongside Bob Paisley, arguably the single greatest figure in Liverpool’s history and a central supporting joist of the glory years to come. Gerrard’s departure leaves Liverpool short of one slightly ponderous 34-year-old central midfielder. But it also plucks out the final on-field stitch connecting the club to this wonderfully lush brocade, a past that, with Gerrard gone, will become just a little more remote. Small wonder, then, that the temptation has been towards hyperbole, including a slightly meaningless suggestion that Gerrard ought to be remembered as Liverpool’s greatest ever player. If this is impossible to prove, or even to argue either way, there are some points worth making before it is even attempted. Firstly Gerrard is surely the only Liverpool player to be so much better than the mean level of quality in the team. The gulf has surely never been so large as it was on occasion between his own stellar moments of inspiration and the base note of grudging place-fillers in some of his more unsurprising teams, a would-be giant slumming it among the Josemis. Similarly his best moment, a major part in Liverpool’s run to the 2005 Champions League victory, is surely among the single greatest sustained feats of individual influence in modern English football. And yet at the same time here is a player who, in his most fretful periods, would have struggled to get on the subs’ bench in Liverpool’s best teams of the last half-century. Advertisement Those great teams may have been more notable for their collective spirit, the primacy of teamwork and method above individual glory. But there are still some giants here. Is Gerrard demonstrably a better player than Kevin Keegan, who over six years was the headline player in three league titles, two Uefa Cups and the 1977 European Cup triumph? Has there ever been a better British central midfielder than Graeme Souness, who played 359 matches, scored 55 goals and drove his team on to five league titles and three European Cups? Souness also scored spectacular goals. He was also inspirational. His levels rarely dipped. Kenny Dalglish was the best player in Britain for several years: has Gerrard ever been this? Ian Callaghan played 857 times and was at Anfield through the dawning of the age of Bill Shankly, from Second Division to European Champions. Roger Hunt, lest we forget, scored 286 goals for Liverpool and won the World Cup with England. The point is that not only are comparisons impossible between different eras and different functions within very different teams but Gerrard is also only ever going to find himself suffering a crick in the neck gazing up at the Olympian pedigree of those who had the good fortune to play in the glory years. Beyond this there is also no single, fixed notion of Gerrard himself. This is a player who emerged as a coltish, buzz-cut local lad and who subsequently filled the roles of hugely promising tyro, midfield wild thing, world-class right-sided player, playmaker, midfield shield, club legend and all round heritage piece. Through all of which Gerrard’s basic longevity has arguably done him few favours. Not only have we seen an entire career played out in the same shirt, with all its associated dips and frustrations, but his time has been unavoidably tied to a period of decisive decline. When Gerrard made his debut, eight years after Liverpool’s last league title, there was still a whisper of empire around the place. When he finally goes those eight years will have stretched to a quarter of a century, with Gerrard the lone constant, a player whose gifts, connection to the club and moments of high-grade inspiration have been the consolation prize and enough still to twang that familiar golden chord. There is a case that being Liverpool’s most prized player has also not been good for him, just as having to provide so often some kind of frenzied, cathartic moment of inspiration has not been helpful. The most striking part of Gerrard’s goal in Istanbul 10 years ago is the sight of him waving his arms about immediately afterwards, lost entirely in the struggle, barely able to control his zeal. This was exactly the right moment to be like that; other times perhaps not so much. But this has so often seemed to be what was required. With this in mind there is a temptation to conclude Gerrard’s basic approach to how the game is to be played has been shaped by this sense of propping up the hopes of a club in a state of tantalising, occasionally defibrillated decline. His peculiarly frantic on-field presence has often been noted. Here is a footballer who has refused to budge from his hometown club but whose stasis has been accompanied by a ferocious sense of trapped energy on the pitch, who plays with all the calm assurance of a man attempting to repair a house that is constantly falling down around his ears. Players are often said to have a picture in their head on the pitch, but Gerrard seems to play with a series of pictures: flashbacks, snapshots, glimpses of some glorious alternative reality that, if he can just pass quickly enough, run a little further snap into a few more tackles, he might just finally catch up with. There is nothing much to be gained from describing him as the best Premier League player of his time. Among midfielders Roy Keane, Patrick Vieira, Frank Lampard, Paul Scholes, David Beckham, Ryan Giggs, Cristiano Ronaldo and one or two others all have a competing claim on a share of that prize. But Gerrard is still perhaps the most captivating on-field presence of his era, a player who more than any other seems to embrace the essence of a time and a place and a club. So much so it is just as useful to speculate on what he might have become in a parallel world where Liverpool had a team to match his talents, not to mention one good enough to punish his inconsistencies by demanding more. It is equally so to imagine what might have happened had Gerrard spread his wings and moved on as he might have in 2005. Those who remember that wonderfully controlled performance as a deep-lying ball winner, playmaker and goalscorer for England in the 5-1 defeat of Germany in Munich in 2001 can speculate as to what Gerrard might have become had the urgency, the fear, the pressure to resuscitate and preserve been removed from his game. All that really seems certain now is that he was a player of great, sustained moments of influence and one who will also be greatly missed for all sorts of reasons.
Don't kid yourself despite their wealth most of them love the money and will take the biggest payday on offer. Gerard is no exception. The standard of football in the MLS is woeful, it's league 1 standard with a smattering of overage quality. I've no doubt he does want to continue playing for a couple of years, but he'd have had plenty of offers over here and in Europe at a far higher standard than the MLS, if he'd have become a free agent come May. He's gone there for the dosh
That's an assumption neither you nor I are qualified to make, as neither of us are mind readers. It says more about the mentality of the observer than the observed if we immediately jump to the conclusion that everyone is motivated solely by money.
