SO now we know. Steven Gerrard will leave Liverpool at the end of the season bringing an end to one of the club’s longest and deepest love affairs, writes STEVE MACLEAN.
His departure will leave a gaping hole in the team and will throw the club into crisis. Or will it?
The statistics put together by Andrew Beasley below seem to support the long held suspicions of rival fans who have mockingly nicknamed the Liverpool captain ‘Stevie Me’, that while Gerrard is a brilliant individual performer, he hasn’t been a great team player. Other than Rafa Benitez, who played Gerrard in a wide or advanced role to negate doubts over his tactical aptitude, every Liverpool manager Gerrard has played under has got better results without him in the side.
As many have asked… #LFC PL record by manager, with and without Gerrard since his debut. Make of it what you will. pic.twitter.com/MQKSorqhvo
— Andrew Beasley (@BassTunedToRed) January 8, 2015
While stats can obfuscate as much as they reveal — and this data only implies a correlation, not a causation — over such a long period of time the trend cannot be ignored: Liverpool have done better without Gerrard in the side.
Even Gerrard’s greatest critics would argue that for the majority of his career he has performed at a very high, if not world-class, level. So this anomaly raises questions not about what Gerrard does, but what he doesn’t do that others might in his absence.
In football as in life it is far easier to point to events that do come about than it is to imagine paths untrodden that might have yielded different, perhaps better, outcomes. Fans will often point to a player’s easily identifiable goals and assists, judging a goalscorer to have played well when, their goal aside, their overall performance has been otherwise poor.
Over the last couple of seasons any criticism of Gerrard has been met with a barrage of “what about his assists and penalties?”, but there have been a number of occasions when Gerrard has been key in Liverpool equalising or getting a winner having earlier contributed to the side being in a position where his subsequent positive intervention was needed.
Do Liverpool come back from 3-0 down to Milan to win the Champions League without Gerrard? No chance. A Gerrard-less Liverpool, without his earlier heroics against Olympiakos, probably doesn’t even make it to the final. Yet, perhaps a team with less blood and thunder and more tactical discipline doesn’t find itself in positions where three goals are needed in the first place.
It’s easy to say that against Leicester and Wimbledon Liverpool would have lost were it not for Gerrard’s four goals, but perhaps a side with somebody more defensively sturdy in his place would have kept two clean sheets? Many fans insist that Gerrard had a stellar season last year, while others suspect that the same team with a genuine defensive midfielder in his place might have gone one step further and won the league.
These alternate realities will always be mere suppositions, and perhaps without Gerrard’s leadership qualities — both much heralded and doubted depending on who you listen to — the team wouldn’t have played with the exuberant confidence and swagger that took them so close last season. But if Gerrard’s influence is so important, why have the results been so consistently better without him in the team?
As much as young players like Henderson are quick to highlight the importance of Gerrard’s stewardship, many of them have played better in his absence. Liverpool’s best two performances over the past two seasons have come at Spurs away and, this season, in the 4-1 mauling of Swansea — both without Gerrard.
It could be argued that in the past Gerrard was misused to the team’s detriment, with only Benitez getting the most out of him in a way that complemented the team as a whole. The Gerrard of today, however, is not the swashbuckling phenomenon of the past, so even if Brendan Rodgers were to utilise him in a more advanced role — as he has on occasions — Gerrard’s lack of mobility and stamina would mean he couldn’t contribute to the high-pressing system in the same way that Sterling, Coutinho, Henderson and even Lallana can.
It’s for this reason that Rodgers has generally deployed the captain in a deeper role, starting attacks and reading the game from behind. But when played there the defensive ill discipline that Benitez identified has contributed to the team’s soft centre. If Gerrard was a luxury player before, the later, more static, Gerrard is at times a liability in a team characterised by mobility and intensity when at its best.
Of course, a manager should be able to get the best out of players, finding ways to use them which maximise their strengths and negate their weaknesses, and many fans have long argued that Gerrard should be used more sparingly, coming on as a sub so that he can concentrate all of his energy into shorter periods of time. When Rodgers finally (and much too late for some) put this to Gerrard, however, we now know that the captain had no interest in a more bit-part role.
For Rodgers this has been a conundrum: play Gerrard and, for all he offers, something will be lost, or leave him out and perturb both the player and large sections of the fanbase. He’s been damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t; Gerrard’s departure will remove this Catch-22.
No player is bigger than the club; not even Steven Gerrard. The good news is that we aren’t losing the player that dragged us by the scruff of the neck to a Champions League final before inspiring an incredible comeback to lift the trophy. We lost that player a half decade ago.
Instead we lose a player pushing 35 who will go down as one of the greats at the very top of a long list of legendary players, having played in inferior teams to the ones most of them were lucky to be part of.
And herein lies the key for Liverpool moving forward. You cannot ‘replace’ Steven Gerrard, whether that be the Gerrard of today or yesteryear. What you can do is find the right components to build a side that functions well as a whole and is better than the sum of its parts.
The future might not be as spectacular or as emotional without Steven Gerrard. Just as he decided to stay because winning the league elsewhere would not have meant so much, Liverpool winning the league without a Scouser that loves the club lifting the trophy won’t be quite the same as it would have been if Gerrard had done so. Yet these too are imagined realities.
Brendan Rodgers and his team must walk on without their inspirational skipper, but also free from the shadow his presence casts over them. He will be missed, no doubt, but Gerrard’s departure could well liberate this young, hungry and talented squad.
Pics: David Rawcliffe-Propaganda.
Did Liverpool ‘walk on’ — and play on — after the devastating events of 1989? YES
Did Liverpool always walk on and play on — after every great player of the past either left or hung up his boots? YES
Did Liverpool walk on and play on after being about one day from the near-death knell of going into Administration? YES
Will Liverpool walk on and play on after Steven Gerrard walks out the door? YES!
The fans, the manager, and the players will be acutely aware of his absence — for a while — but if there is passion for the shirt, love for the game itself apart from any of the modern distractions, and unity and respect in the support, then success and greatness will follow.
Brutal points, and not ones that I’m prepared to accept in whole… but that last bit, about which Gerrard we’re about to lose is spot on.
If this is to be believed then maybe we should ask him to clear his locker now?
The thing with statistics is that they become more accurate the more data they have to draw on. In this case the ‘With Gerrard’ side has over four times as much information as the ‘Without’; you could look on it as there being four times as much opportunity for things to go wrong in a match he’s played in. Who knows, with another 372 games (and that’s a hell of a lot of games) of playing without him, the numbers might have evened out, or even been much worse (or much better; as I said, who knows).
In this sense the 2010/11 and Dalglish columns are the most fairly matched; but then you could add they contain too small a sample to be accurate.
Interesting, anyway. Whatever the truth is, I just hope that after his departure the rest of them step up and create their own legacies. After all, there’ll be no excuses left.
494 matches vs. 122 is so lopsided a comparison as to be statistically meaningless. Might as well claim “titles won without Gerrard: 18 – With Gerrard: 0”.
Between this and Nevin’s “Stevie Me” piece, I don’t know if TAW are simply trying to blunt the pain of Gerrard’s departure via cold detachment, or if they’re opportunistically embracing iconoclasm for its own sake. Either way, poor reads, both articles.
TAW isn’t trying to do anything. Gerrard leaving the club is massive, hence the number of posts about him. But every post is the author’s opinion, nothing more. That’s why since the news broke we’ve had so many different opinions on here. As it should be. The posts have gone up as they have arrived, there isn’t a Gerrard strategy, sadly.
“While stats can obfuscate as much as they reveal — and this data only implies a correlation, not a causation — over such a long period of time the trend cannot be ignored: Liverpool have done better without Gerrard in the side.”
Wrong.
Based on the numbers above, the average points accrued when Gerrard has played is 1.78 (879.91 points accrued in 494 games). When he hasn’t played, it’s 1.76 (215.11points accrued in 122 games).
But even leaving aside the numbers, if LFC were/are a better team without Gerrard, why has every manager that’s ever managed him considered him a first pick (SG was injured for most of Dalglish’s term)? I guess we can only conclude that none of them knew what he was doing.
“We lost that player a half decade ago.”
It’s gone up to “half a decade ago”, now, is it? This historical revisionism where Gerrard is concerned is starting to wear a little thin.
Couldn’t agree more with this comment, spot on.
Much more thought should have gone into this article, sorry to say.
Gerrard’s early career should be removed from this comparison. He was a much better player 5 years ago, and he was in a better side for the most part. The last three seasons would be more relevant to what the club will be losing, not what he was doing 5-10 years ago.
Under Rodgers, Gerrard as been rested for the so-called “easier” games. So you’d expect a greater ppg, right? I’m laying to one side the fact that 7 games without Gerrard would be considered statistically immaterial in the broader scheme of things.
Also, using the figures above, it seems Liverpool have accrued 15 points from their 7 games without Gerrard under Roddgers. I’m assuming that includes 3pts for the home victory against Stoke when Gerrard began on the bench. Of course, without him on the pitch the score remained 0-0 and it wasn’t until after his introduction we actually went on to score and win. So lend those three points to the ‘Gerrard IN’ calculation and you actually get a higher ppg with Gerrard IN under Rodgers than you do with Gerrard out.
Stats, eh?
I think you missed the writer’s qualification, mate. He made the point outside Benitez’s use of Stevie. The stats are then:
With SG 1.5425 points per game (in 298 games) vs. Without SG 1.7775 points per game (in 90 games)
Just saying…
Earlier in the article he states that other than under Benitez – where the record is better with Gerrard IN than OUT – the ‘by manager’ record is better with Gerrard OUT than IN. Which is true, although you have to ask the question why you would want to discount the Benitez era record given Gerrard played more games under Benitez than he did any other? It’s like saying ‘take away the most representative sample in this statistical analysis and your figures change’. No shit. But regardless, later in the article – without any qualification – he writes:
“While stats can obfuscate as much as they reveal — and this data only implies a correlation, not a causation — over such a long period of time the trend cannot be ignored: Liverpool have done better without Gerrard in the side.”
That is flat-out wrong. The overall record is better with Gerrard IN.
I don’t understand the Totals either. How come With Gerrard’s ‘Points Per Game’ average is actually HIGHER than Without Gerrard’s?! It’s not doing much for the argument! If Houllier and Benitez cancel each other out (Houllier, Without Gerrard is +0.10 higher; Benitez, Without Gerrard is -0.10 lower) and all the rest are higher in the Without Gerrard column – how does it end up with WITH Gerrard being higher overall?
If you add up all the totals and divide by the five rows (which I’ve just done ‘cos I’m sad) you get something like:
WITH GERRARD: Played 494 PPG 1.61 GDPG 0.43
WITHOUT GERRARD: Played 122 PPG 1.78 GDPG 0.87
Maybe that’s not how you work it out at all and is completely mistaken – I honestly dunno’. But the results look more logical.
Rob, you have to multiply out each line to look at the points accrued under each manager. So for Benitez with Gerrard in the team, you’ve got 196 games with a ppg of 1.91 giving you a Benitez total of 374.36. Do that for all managers, add the totals and then divide by the total number of games. Do that for both Gerrard IN and Gerrard OUT and you get a ppg of 1.78 with him playing, and 1.76 when he did not.
The reason in layman terms is that ppg achieved over higher numbers of games carries a higher weighting in the total calculation (i.e. it’s statistically more material to the overall calculation what happened under Houllier and Benitez).
The statement referring to our “best performances” were badly wrong. we still beat spurs 4-0 on the return leg at home (with gerrard). Our best performances under rodgers have been man city 3-2 at home (with gerrard), everton 4-0 at home (with gerrard) and arsenal 5-1 at home (with gerrard). Stats like these were brought up before suarez left and some (really blinded) people believed we would be better without him. Now he’s gone we know for a fact that we aren’t. It’s fair to say we’ll be better without him now because he’s 35 and age has caught up with his energy levels so he’s affecting our pressing game. But to imply we’ve “ALWAYS” been better without him is complete rubbish.
I keep refreshing the page expecting to see the ‘Stevie G – How Shit Was He?’ article.
Sorry Brownie, hadn’t seen your post. Was going to add: Which doesn’t mean that even if the revised numbers ARE right they’re still meaningless. As above – how come all these managers never realised the detrimental effect he was having on the team?
OK, I’m with it. Times games by average points and add them all up. Which does indeed give 1.78 v 1.76 in favour of games where Gerrard has played. And sustained over the equivalent of about 7 seasons longer than the Without Gerrard numbers.
Which makes the whole argument nonsense.
Make that 8 (busy) seasons. It should be obvious that maths is not my strong point.
Brownie – ta for that. Trying to work that out, was driving me nuts! Well, maybe I am nuts and Gerrard really has held the team back over all these years.
You’d think so reading some of the stuff written here (above and below the line) in recent days.
Still, a game of opinions and all that…
How about just saying thanks to the lad and “the best of luck” in the future and leave all this other nonsense behind. Only people with agendas could be any way critical of the man, but we know that there are lots of them around.
Brilliant article. Thoughtful, honest, hopeful even though it’s uncomfortable and in a sense, brutal. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Steve.
As Brownie has pointed out above, your calculations are obviously incorrect; the methodology is absurd and illogical too. ‘Statistically’ speaking, how can you compare two highly skewed samples (in terms of size / matches / performances)?
A word of caution – numbers are just that. They can be twisted any which way depending on what you want the result / conclusion to be (trust me, I do it for a living).
And TAW, what is your point? Analyze ‘rival fans’ comments’ and bring a long-standing skipper and servant of this club to justice? Ruin the last 4.5 months that we have left of him to watch here? Keep driving a knife into him till he plays? So what is next – the slip?
Stevie does that to you – fans or foes, he invokes the fiercest of reactions, isn’t it? Can you let him be?
But then, don’t. Keep these ‘opinions of the author’ coming. For Stevie. Simply because he has risen stronger and performed better when questioned and criticized the most. And as a die-hard red and an SG fan, I’d love to see more of what he has been up to in the new year.
How many of those games that Gerrard played in would we have lost if he hadn’t been playing.
Really Steve? You amaze me!
1. There is absolutely no way we would have pushed for the top 4 (forget the title!) had it not been for our attack (read Suarez) last year. But he was leaving us for Arsenal and mentioned (repeatedly) that Stevie made him stay the season. So now are you going to tell me that we would have won without him too? Of course you are!! Because I read another ‘statistic’ someplace which proved that LFC was better without Suarez.
Again, they are just numbers. Can be easily played around with. And fooled with too!
2. Yes, Stevie is pushing 35 – but time waits for no man remember? He is older, inconsistent and whatever else. But (assuming I take all your arguments which are baseless anyway) answer one question.
Who captains us next season? Who ensures we stick together? Who keeps all egos (and the eccentrics) at bay and can be a unanimous leader? Who leads by example from the front, with the same passion AND composure?
Who takes the penalties and the dead balls with that kind of accuracy not to mention the spot-on long passes?
Yes, the latter can be developed, maybe, but someone who can do so as soon as Stevie leaves? Nah, not one of the ‘lads’ can do it individually. But yes, as a team, we will…with time.
3. ‘A little less blood & thunder’ and ‘more tactic’ you say? Since when did Liverpool play that way? And if we did…God bless Shankly and Paisley!!
4. Tell me, what if Benitez sat out Gerrard that fateful night in Istanbul and Milan had still gone on to score 3? Everyone had written us off by HT and I still remember the commentary – ‘and surely this is good night’ they said.
And was it a good night? Yes. For us, for LFC. It was an awesome night but would it have been were it not for Stevie? Without that ‘blood & thunder’ that you now begrudge? I doubt.
5. Do you think the ‘young energetic lads’ were up to winning this year’s home derby? What a pathetic performance it was and if it hadn’t been for his curler…..
So much more to go on… You are basing theories on extended realms of probability and sadly, your statistics are just not sound enough! We could do the same..in favour of Stevie.. but then that would be fantasy and not ‘probability’ in your eyes I assume?
The whole argument isn’t nonsense. It has been apparent for the past couple of seasons that we may be better without him in the team. For me, the best performance in recent times was Tottenham away 0-5 where Gerrard didn’t play. In the past few weeks, he didn’t play in the Swansea mauling and returned for the disappointing draw. These stats are not the whole argument – they are there to provide back-up to an idea that already existed.
It is possible to be more balanced without him in the team despite him being an incredible player. The data highlights that Benitez got the best out of him, when he released him from the defensive burden, but I remember Paul Tomkins writing a similar article using the same stats back then.
The whole issue reminds of the famous “Beckham qualifier’ vs Greece. Beckham stole the show – he was all over the pitch and obviously scored the famous free-kick winner. He was a nation’s hero and no time whatsoever was given to the thought that Greece’s two goals from having a clear run from defence to attack on the side that Beckham should have been covering.
What this comment does is confirm my long-held suspicion that only best players are questioned for what they *can’t* or *don’t* do. So the anonymous (relatively speaking) midfielder who provides a bit more solidity defensively is never questioned about why he can’t curl in a free-kick from 30 yards.
FWIW, Beckham was pretty good defensively, helped by having the best engine in the entire England squad, but he wasn’t picked to provide defensive cover. Isn’t that the point? Ditto Gerrard for majority of his career. How is any of this different to criticizing Lucas for his abysmal goal-scoring record, for example?
As someone else has already pointed out, there are plenty of good performances in recent times when Gerrard played (0-3 at Spurs this season (and against 11 men), 3-2 against City last season), and plenty of shocking performances when he didn’t play (home to Sunderland and Stoke this season).
SG is not a DM and it is not in his DNA. He has trained and played 20 years going all out on the attack which is why the ‘playmaker’ role is not exactly a best fit for him (especially at such a late stage in his career). It is easier to suggest what style he should ‘adapt’ to but then let us also understand that he is not a Xabi Alonso kind of player (who is also awesome btw!). Stevie has relied more on his running, passing and pure brute force than cliched tactics and technique and it has worked for him so long.
Messi and Hazard do not do much (nothing that is) defensive work; yes, they have the goals to show for it but so did SG back then, did he not? So let us come back when Messi / Hazard are ~35 – if they are half as good as now and also perform defensive duties which Stevie so ‘apparently’ neglects, we shall continue this debate then.
And below is that piece of nonsense – Statistics – that I came across as mentioned in an earlier post:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/liverpool-really-better-luis-suarez-3588404