English football legend and hero of the Kop Steven Gerrard announced his retirement from the game last week. Liverpool fanatic Ahad Noor gives us his heartfelt take on an astounding individual career, and explains how it shaped his love of football growing up.

Michael Owen is actually the reason I started supporting Liverpool. I was six years old and I liked the look of that really fast guy kicking the ball into the goal. He happened to play for the Reds and so I ended up supporting them – if he had been playing for Wigan Athletic I’d probably be cheering them on right now. But back then it wasn’t real support, more something to talk about in the playground. I would collect sticker packs, play football at lunch times and watch the odd episode of ITV’s terrible The Premiership on the weekend. Hence all my memories of football from that time have U2’s ‘Beautiful Day’ playing in the background.

2004 was a big year for my relationship with football. I spent the summer enthralled by European Championships in Portugal, featuring an England team actually playing well in a tournament but still succumbing to penalty shootout heartbreak. I also moved up to Secondary School where suddenly the football chat got a bit more serious and I’d finally found some fellow Liverpool fans (I grew up in a pro-Chelsea/Arsenal area). Moreover, Match of the Day had returned to BBC and I started watching football much more regularly. So my love of football was growing, but it still needed a spark. Step forward Steven Gerrard.

“Ooohhh ya beauuuty! What a hit son! WHAT A HIT!!!!” roared Andy Gray after Gerrard fired in a rocket in front of the Kop that would get us out of the Champions League groups and on our way to that night in Istanbul. With Michael Owen enjoying the splendour of Madrid, Gerrard was the main man on Merseyside now. That excitement I felt when I first watched Owen as a kid I now felt watching Gerrard. He was the perfect footballer for an eleven year old boy. When you’re that age you don’t care about smart tactics or intelligent movement. All you want to see is big tackles, big passes and even bigger shots. Stevie did that and then some!

There is a song that Liverpool fans sing that goes, “We all dream of a team of Carraghers, a team of Carraghers…”. But if you really had to have a team made up of one player, surely Steven Gerrard would be the pick. He could tackle like Keane, pass like Scholes, and shoot like Lampard. Throughout his career he has played in almost every position: centre midfield, right wing, left wing, right back, and second striker. You’d probably even back him to be a decent goalie such is his desire to succeed. There may have been better players in those positions but I struggle to think of a player who could do it all to such a high level.

More important than any of his physical attributes was his mental fortitude. When everyone on and off the pitch would lose their heads and start to give up, Stevie would keep going. I struggle to think of a player who has saved his team from the brink as many times as him. It was his headed goal that revived Liverpool against Milan in Istanbul, and then his surging run into the box that won the penalty to complete the greatest comeback in football history.

A year later he would dominate an FA Cup final so much so it is now known as the ‘Gerrard Final’. Having already provided an assist and a goal, his team were 3-2 down with the match going into the 90th minute. Having been down with cramp a few moments before, he lashes one in from 40 yards past the helpless Shaka Hislop. No other player could have done that.

For most of his time at Liverpool, Gerrard was surrounded by mediocrity, which make his achievements all the more astounding. He won the Champions League with Djimi Traoré for god’s sake! DJIMI FUCKING TRAORÉ!

When he did have genuine world class talent around him, he and Liverpool would inevitably go up a few levels – as he did in that great Liverpool team with Xabi Alonso and Javier Mascherano in the middle, and a red hot Fernando Torres up front.

Before the age of Messi and Ronaldo had properly got going and in the twilight of Ronaldinho’s peak, there was a period during the 2008-09 season where I genuinely thought he was the best player in the world. Benitez had freed him from defensive duties and decided to play him as a foil to Torres, and they produced one of the deadliest attacks of any Liverpool team in history.

He dragged us to our best league finish in a generation, losing out to one of Ferguson’s greatest Man United teams and with a points total that would have sealed the championship in any other year. One of the high-points of that season was beating Real Madrid 4-0 in the Champions League, with Gerrard scoring two. Afterwards even the legend Zinedine Zidane described him as the best player in the world.

From then on his captaincy at Liverpool was bittersweet. The club was all over the place, with cowboy owners, the trauma of Roy Hodgson, the return of King Kenny, Suarez-shaped-scandals, and eventually the heartbreak of 2013-14.

Everyone remembers the slip – and it will haunt him for the rest of his life – but they must also remember that team wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t for Gerrard. He was immense that season.

After injury problems and adjusting to his body slowing down, he reinvented himself as a deep-lying playmaker, a position many thought he was not tactically adept enough to play. It was easily Gerrard’s best season following his peak years. Acting as a quarterback does in American football, he would dictate play from the back and ping superb balls into the front three, like this piece of magic below.

No one in football deserved to win the Premier League more than Steven Gerrard. But his failure to do so shouldn’t be held against him. He achieved so much in his career and with the club he loved, instead of chasing money or success elsewhere like most of his peers.

I’ve been living in Liverpool for five years now and you see the best traits of Scousers in him. He possesses extreme loyalty, self-confidence, quick wit and an unpretentiousness that makes him so endearing to fans. That’s why there was so much emotion when he left Liverpool last year and it is also why he has been bombarded with messages of goodwill since he’s retired. Ex-teammates, adversaries, foreign legends like Iker Casillas, and even the official accounts of Barcelona and AC Milan have sent him eulogies.

He remains the only player to score in a League Cup, FA Cup, Uefa Cup and Champions League final. He played over 700 games for Liverpool and 114 games for England. More important than all of this was his presence and will to win. He never ever gave up. In an age where footballers are so detached from the average fan, Stevie was an exception. He played like a fan on the pitch and you could see how much it meant to him.

For Liverpool fans he is the best there is, the best there was and the best there ever will be.

Photo credits + links:

Steven Gerrard v Real Madrid 2009 – copyright terceroinf fmiralcamp (flickr)

Gerrard celebrating v Middlesbrough 2008 – copyright Philip Wilson (flickr)