Last November, Steven Gerrard
spent this international week captaining England to a Wembley defeat
against Germany. A year earlier there was the 4-2 reverse in Sweden as
Zlatan Ibrahimovic had his wicked way with Ryan Shawcross and the rest.
Maybe Gerrard wasn’t missing it too much.
Liverpool supporters will certainly be hoping that their skipper
returns to action refreshed. After being controversially omitted from
the starting line-up in the Bernabeu, the visit to Crystal Palace on
Sunday will be only his second start since the defeat to Newcastle on
the first day of November.
Gerrard needed the break. After
describing last season’s title collapse and the subsequent World Cup woe
as “the worst three months” of his life, the gloom has carried into the
current campaign. The reasons for Liverpool’s struggles are manifold
but the midfielder has not escaped criticism.
Understandably given his track record, there has been a rush to
defend him. “I had to laugh when people started writing Steven Gerrard
off,” wrote Jamie Redknapp in the
Daily Mail. “Liverpool have a few bad results and all of a sudden it’s his fault? Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just lazy.”
And
yet, both Gerrard and his manager Brendan Rodgers appear aware that
there is an issue to address. It has become clear in the early part of
this season that’s Gerrard’s slip that launched a thousand vines was
more than a source of schadenfreude, it flagged up the fact that defence
is the best form of attack in limiting his influence from deep.
Aston
Villa’s Gabriel Agbonlahor and Stewart Downing of West Ham both had
success in moving into Gerrard’s space to deny him the room to act as a
springboard for attacks. “Teams have worked that out,” says Phil
Neville. Gerrard himself has acknowledged the difficulty. “I’ve been
stifled in a couple of games when people have followed me around and I
haven’t been able to shake them off.”
Problem
The problem
has been exacerbated by the loss of Luis Suarez which has allowed
Liverpool’s opponents to defend higher up the pitch. The Opta stats show
that Chelsea’s possession-winning line at Anfield was eight metres
higher this season, while Newcastle (3m) and West Ham (5m) each pressed
higher up than the previous year to good effect en route to three
points.
As a consequence, teams are squeezing space on Gerrard at a
stage in his career when he needs more of it not less. The 34-year-old
has bristled at suggestions he “can’t run” these days but few would
expect him to be haring around the field with the freedom of old. That’s
not the demands of his role anymore and there is an argument that
working smarter not harder is the key.
Nevertheless the Premier League tracking data indicates that while
his numbers are respectable they have tailed off slightly. Gerrard has
had seven ‘11 kilometre games’ in 2014 but three of them came in January
and a further two in February. The most recent such match was the
previous trip to Selhurst Park in May. To put it another way, Gerrard
hit the 11km mark in six of his first nine Premier League appearances of
2014 but has failed to do so in any of his last 12 games.
