How much more indignity is Steven Gerrard expected to take? Of course there will be many in the game of football who cherish the British sporting tribalism which allows supporters to sing about his slip, and his stamp and the absence of titles. I, for one, don’t celebrate that partisanship as “part of the game". Gerrard has endured more than he ever expected.

He launched himself into an unthinkable challenge on Sunday because he had been launched into the cause of a Liverpool team which – as so often in this past decade – just could not do without him. That is a cross and a responsibility which the other legends of L4 who are up there alongside him such as Liverpool’s greatest of the great – Kenny Dalglish – just never had to bear.

When a 24-year-old Gerrard was agonising over whether to stay at Liverpool or leave for Chelsea, 11 long years ago, he opted for Anfield on the basis that the future looked promising. The club had bought Xabi Alonso at the time and Champions League football was a regular part of the landscape. But it has actually turned out to be a decade of wretched, never-ending transition for Liverpool, instead. Alonso left, Fernando Torres left, Luis Suarez arrived and left. And Gerrard was left behind, still carrying the club and the burden.

Gerrard was left carrying the burden at Liverpool after Fernando Torres and Xabi Alonso left Anfield.

Consider this, when you weigh up all that Ryan Giggs achieved in his title laden years at Old Trafford and what Gerrard has been doing down the M62. When Giggs turned 35, in November 2008, Manchester United had moved on, re-tooled – to quote the vocabulary of their chief executive Ed Woodward - and the Welshman was just a very useful part of the fixtures and fittings. He played 15 league games in 2008-09, was a substitute almost as often, and was able to offer his best. Frank Lampard turned 35 in June last year, before a season in which he started 20 league games. When this season was only a third gone Gerrard – who is 35 in May - had already played 12 league games. December’s game against Stoke was only the second fixture he had not started, the League Cup aside. And he had always played the full 90 minutes.

“ When Giggs turned 35, in November 2008, Manchester United had moved on."

It felt right that Brendan Rodgers began to use him less and I, for one, was much taken with his old team-mate Jamie Carragher’s notion of the new Gerrard manifestation we might be about to see. "Can you imagine the reaction inside Anfield with 30 minutes of a tight game remaining and [Gerrard] getting stripped for action?" he wrote in his Daily Mail column. "With space to exploit and energy to change the game, he could be a lethal weapon..." Carragher cited in that piece the impact that Giggs and Paul Scholes had made in their twilight years. But Gerrard did not find the same sunny uplands that those two found in their twilight years at Old Trafford. When the old enemy arrived on Sunday, Liverpool found themselves struggling again. Buckling. They sent their talisman him on to do a rescue job and, Gerrard being Gerrard, he will have believed that he had the powers to snap into the same tackles, tell opponents he was around. He didn’t.

Reaching great individual heights with a stellar team, as Giggs and Scholes did, is one thing. Reaching them with a side which so often been modest and moribund is something quite different. Supporters will chant and laugh and mock but Gerrard’s accomplishments are greater than those of Giggs and Scholes – whose names they laud.