Michael Holding was once asked by Ravi Shastri about the art of fast bowling. The question was innocuous but the answer was profound. You know, Raavi, drawled Holding, by the time you learn the art of fast bowing, you are no longer bowling fast. Therein lies the secret of longevity of any athlete. When you’re not being propelled past your opponents by the sheer accleleration in your limbs, that explosive power is gone, your responses are a crucial milisecond slower, and your lungs threaten to give up just a few seconds before the other guy, that’s when your brain needs to take over and give you that additional 10% which could crudely be called sporting intelligence, or wisdom, or experience. Used well, this can more than compensate for the loss of strength and speed that necessarily befalls professional sporstpeople in the second half of their careers.
Roger Federer, Michael Holding, Wasim Akram, Michael Jordan, Shane Warne … the list goes on. Players who enjoyed success at the top beyond reasonable years. But what about footballers? who are those players who seem to defy the ageing process? Milan’s famous lab kept a number of players going, apparently for ever. Clarence Seedorf was probably the signature player over the past few years. A commentator, I forget who, was once asked “what does Seedorf do for this team?” – “He wins things” was the succinct answer. Football is arguably one of the hardest sports in which to age well. Speed, stamina, strength are all so critical, and as a contact sport your body takes a lot of beating.
Which is why I think the contrast between Pirlo and Gerrard is instructive.
Andrea Pirlo wears a T-shirt that goes “No Pirlo, No Party”. How many footballers can carry that off? This is a player who doesn’t score many goals, doesn’t defend heroically, and isn’t a so-called box-to-box midfielder. But more than almost anybody I can remember, he has mastered the art of football long before his body has started to fail him. Pirlo will never be the athlete that Gerard is. He probably doesn’t have the same range of long passing, covers less ground, puts in less tackles, is a year older than Gerrard and a couple of inches shorter. But in the past 3-4 years, as both players have become the elder statesmen of their football clubs, it’s Pirlo who has added that dollop of football intelligence to his game. If you saw him in the England v Italy game in the world cup, 2014, it was clear that he was on a different plane to the 21 others. While everybody else was rock-n-rolling furiously, he was playing jazz. His dummy, which led to Marchisio’s opening goal, was probably his Miles Davis moment of the game. In that game, Pirlo didn’t really seem to break sweat, yet he controlled the game, setting up both goals and hitting the bar from a free kick that left Joe Hart bewildered.
By contrast, Gerrard is the all action hero who has been Liverpool’s man of the hour in so many big and small moments over the past decade and a half, that it seems churlish to even count them. I’m sure every Liverpool fan has his or her favourite moments, but the goal against West Ham in the 90th minute of the FA Cup Final, and his performance on THAT night in Istanbul should be etched into the memory of any football fan. Regularly a 20-goals-a-season midfielder, and the provider of defence splitting passes down the ages for Owen, Torres or Suarez, Gerrard has always been the one man army every manager wants. The one key flaw in Gerrard’s game, though, has been his inability to read and control the game at a plane different from his physical prowess and impact. In contrast to the Pirlo game, Gerrard’s influence in a game is directly defined by his personal contribution to scoring, tackling or assisting. You may point to his position as second in the all time assists list in the premier league. But there’s more to controlling the game than that. There is reading the tempo, understanding when the opposition is tiring, knowing where the danger lies and where opportunities may arise as the game goes on. This has never been Gerrard’s forte and consequently, he finds his role being questioned as his physical prowess can no longer keep him at the very top.
Pirlo’s game was once described on a popular podcast as ‘a man playing like he enjoys a lot of good sex’ – a completely meaningless comment that somehow manages to convey the zen like calm Pirlo enjoys on the field. Of course Pirlo himself has said that he rates football higher than sex – “much better to be a soldier on the pitch than in the bedroom”. Fittingly, his autobiography is titled “I Think Therefore I Play” and reaffirms his position as the eminent thinking man’s footballer.
Gerrard is justifiably a footballing god to many. He just isn’t the thinking footballer that every team also needs. You would even argue that a great, thinking footballer would really complement the all action style that Gerrard epitomises. Lampard clearly wasn’t that player, and that may just be the epitaph on one of the most under-achieving and over-promising midfield partnerships in recent footballing history. In fact, I would argue that England’s problem lies in the deification of Gerrard as the model of everything a footballer should be and largely ignoring the intellectual demands of the game.
The English National Team’s football problem may also be rephrased as an alarming number of promising 17 and 18 year olds, who grow to become average 24 year olds. This arrested development is arguably down to the lack of intellectual evolution over this period – a steadfast ignoring of the ‘art of football’. Michael Owen hit his peak long before his 24th birthday and plenty of people will argue the same about Rooney. Footballers traditionally peak in their late 20s, but this requires the evolution of the footballing brain.
It may not be a coincidence that some of the most crucial moments of Gerrard’s career are also tragic ones. His slip against Chelsea to hand the title to Manchester City, his backpass against Chelsea, and prior to that against Arsenal, are all well documented. It was his attempted header that played in Luis Suarez in the World Cup this year. These are the attributes of a man who will run himself into the ground for a cause, but will not necessarily keep his brain engaged. Instinct over reason, effort over intellect. These are all the qualities that English commentators and writers love to gush about. The word lion-hearted could have been invented for Gerrard.
This is why I’m bemused when there is a clamour for Rooney to be the next captain because he’s also lion-hearted and can be a “leader on the field”. Rooney displays a lot of the same qualities that both elevate and reduce Gerrard. It remains to be seen whether Rooney can, under the influence of Van Gaal and Hodgson, add brain power to his game for the last third of his playing career.
Football fans are a funny lot. We gush over the tricksters and hustling tacklers, and the fancy footwork of wingers until suddenly we wake up to the “Claude Makalele” phenomenon. Then we worship the role but ignore any player who plays the simple, clean game. Most United fans had almost forgotten about Michael Carrick and it is worth noting that his return from injury has seen Man United start to win games more cohesively.
Roy Keane, who I consider to be an intelligent footballer, but one so complex and possessing a dark side, he would be a psychologist’s dream, talked in his autobiography (the first one) about reading the game. About building a sixth sense about when the opponent was there for the taking, when to thrust, and when to parry. It wasn’t just the force of his personality as captain that drove United to glory, it was also his mastery of the art of readng football games (and as Haaland and others will testify, of the dark arts of football too).
Football needs intelligent players – the Henrys, the Cantonas and and Pirlos. Shorn of their intellect, the game would descend into a round robin of phyical ability alone. But with the sprinking of the creative and intellectual firepower, we may see its elevation to the art form that Michael Holding was reminiscing about, all those days ago.
Super article…