Liverpool Football Club. - My Story

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Michael Joseph is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published 2015

Copyright Steven Gerrard, 2015

Cover photography Paul Stuart

Picture permissions can be found

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-1-405-92442-9

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For My Family and Friends

My first book, Gerrard, was published in 2006. This new book concentrates on recent events and offers further reflections on my twenty-seven-year career with Liverpool, and fourteen years with England, alongside a more personal analysis of some of the high and low points that have shaped my life.

I sat in the back of the car and felt the tears rolling down my face. I hadnt cried for years but, on the way home, I couldnt stop. The tears kept coming on a sunlit evening in Liverpool. It was very quiet as we moved further and further away from Anfield. I cant remember now how long that journey lasted. I cant even tell you if the streets were thick with traffic or as empty as I was on the inside. It was killing me.

An hour earlier, after the Chelsea game, Id wanted to disappear down a dark hole. Our second-last home match of the season was meant to have been the title-clincher. We had beaten our closest rivals, Manchester City, in the previous game at Anfield. We had just reeled off our eleventh straight win. One more victory and we would be almost certain to win the league for the first time since May 1990.

Twenty-four years earlier, in the month I turned ten, that team of me and my dads dreams had been managed by Kenny Dalglish and captained by Alan Hansen. It was also the team of McMahon and Molby, of Beardsley and Rush, of Whelan and Barnes.

I was dreaming of today even then, as a boy who had joined the Liverpool Academy at the age of eight and wished and prayed that, one day, he might also win the league in front of the Kop. My first-team debut came in 1998, when I was eighteen and I had no idea how it might feel to be a thirty-three-year-old man crying in the back of a car.

I felt numb, like I had lost someone in my family.

It was as if my whole quarter of a century at this football club poured out of me. I did not even try to stem the silent tears as the events of the afternoon played over and over again in my head.

In the last minute of the first half against a cagey Chelsea, set up to stop our rush to glory by Jos Mourinho, it happened. A simple pass rolled towards me near the halfway line. It was a nothing moment, a lull in our surge to the title. I moved to meet the ball. It slid under my foot.

The twist came then. I slipped. I fell to the ground.

The ball was swept away and the devastating Chelsea attack began. I clambered to my feet and ran with all my heart. I chased Demba Ba as though my life depended on it. I knew the outcome if I couldnt catch him. But it was hopeless. I couldnt stop him.

Ba scored. It was over. My slip had been costly.

I was in the car with Alex, my wife, and Gratty, Paul McGratten, one of my closest friends. Alex and Gratty were trying hard to help me, to console me. They were saying words like, Look, it can still change, therere still a few games to go

But I knew. The fate of the title was now in Manchester Citys hands and they would not blow it. There would be no comeback for Liverpool. There would be no Miracle of Istanbul a repeat of that Champions League final when, in 2005, we were 30 down at half-time against AC Milan, the Italian masters of defence, and yet we fought back and won the game on penalties. I had been at the heart of that team. I was already Liverpool captain all those years ago. I scored the first goal in our long climb back against Milan. I kissed and held the Champions League trophy, and kissed it again, before anyone else on that magical night in Istanbul.

I knew the glory of victory just as I knew the despair of defeat. I had lost another Champions League final, against Milan once more, two years later. I was the only player to have scored in the finals of the League Cup, the FA Cup, the UEFA Cup and the Champions League. I had played more than one hundred times for England in World Cups and European Championships. I was still captain of England. Soon, we would travel to Brazil for my last major tournament.

At Liverpool, meanwhile, the battle to win justice for the families of our ninety-six fans, including my ten-year-old cousin Jon-Paul Gilhooley, who had died so tragically at Hillsborough, continued. We had just marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of our loss and yet big steps had been taken to expose the lies and cover-ups which had hidden the truth for so long.

The dark and the light, the elation and the misery, were familiar. They stood together, apart but inseparable, like two posts in an empty goal at Anfield.

The league was different. I had wanted to win it with Liverpool for so long that, now it had gone again, I could not hold my emotion in check. The tears trickled on; and the city I loved became a blur.

I beat myself up. My head was all over the place. Its a familiar trait with me; but I didnt feel I was being too harsh or self-critical then. I had lived through many great moments in my career and achieved success beyond my most fevered boyhood dreams. I had played and scored in games and tournaments which belonged to another world from the Bluebell Estate in Huyton, Liverpool 36, where I had grown up. I had done things that would have shocked me as a kid.

I had also given absolutely everything of myself to Liverpool FC: in training, in almost 700 games, off the pitch, around the squad and as part of the club, the community and the city. I could not have done any more. I had squeezed out every last ounce of ambition and desire and hope inside me. In the end, it had not been quite enough to help us win the title everyone at Liverpool craved.

Instead of hitting a long crossfield pass to set up a goal, making a decisive tackle or curling the ball into the back of Mark Schwarzers net to seal our victory, I had fallen over. Chelsea scored a second goal in the final minute, but the killer moment was that simple change of luck.

Here comes the ball, a pass from Mamadou Sakho, and here comes the slip. I fall down.