Okay, so he's going to play for his second club. But when it comes to one-club players, the sense is far more important than the reality.
You have to hand it to Steven Gerrard. As he looked out at the steaming mess of Liverpool's league campaign and saw nothing in the immediate future, he took action. He announced his departure. Instantly, what would have been a long, slow, painful limp towards the Sophie's choice of possible Europa League qualification, was transformed into a six-month celebration of him, of his career, of his general wonderfulness. Truly, he's caught this one nicely.
He's off to America, as you've no doubt heard. Kobe Bryant has welcomed Gerrard to Los Angeles, while the country he leaves behind has been rolling out the eulogies. Anybody who bought shares in "inspirational", "irreplaceable" and "Istanbul" will have been doing well (as, to be fair, will anybody with a stake in "overrated," "backpass" or "this does not slip"). Though in the rush to praise him, some notable outlets slightly lost track of some trifling matters, like the meaning of words. Take this from BBC Radio, a question put to listeners on the day of his announcement:
Is Steven Gerrard the greatest ever one-club player?
An odd question, considering he'd literally just informed the world he would be moving to another club. Perhaps that's just how the British think of teams in MLS.
But then, it's an odd thing, the notion of a one-club player. They are, by their very nature, paragons of all the good things that footballers can be: loyal, devoted, the onfield avatars of the unbreakable connection between fan and club. Somebody to be aspired to, somebody to admire. How football should be done; a throwback to the good old days, when all that mattered was the colour of the shirt and that a player was fighting for his people. (Those good old days may never have actually existed, but hush.) And if there aren't many of them, well, then that only enhances their mystique.
The oddness, though, comes from the fact that there's an awful lot that needs to run a certain way for any player to secure one-club status, and much of that is out of the hands of the player. The wrong managerial appointment, a sudden financial crisis, the arrival of a better replacement, a serious injury and permanently diminishing injury ... there's a lot of luck baked into the idea.
Most obviously, the player and the club need to remain at all points good enough for one another. Works nicely when it's Ryan Giggs and Manchester United, or Paolo Maldini and Milan; not so much when Gerrard fancies playing every game and winning a few more trophies, but has been told by Liverpool that the former is unlikely, and perhaps has doubts about the latter as well. If Maldini came through at Milan now, he'd be off to Juventus before you could say "wait, don't you want to play alongside Philippe Mexes?"
Yet Gerrard, while he will lose his one-club status the moment he trots out onto the StubHub Center field, is still going to be the embodiment of all those good things that a one-club player theoretically embodies (his mysterious flirtation with Chelsea notwithstanding). After all, in the wake of Gerrard's announcement there was more than one Liverpool fan who expressed delight at having seen their dream lived out by somebody else, a sentiment hardly diminished by the fact he is going to seek his fortune in California rather than the television studio.
In doing so, in abandoning his membership of the one-club club, he's in good company. There are a whole raft of footballers who quite clearly are one-club players ... apart from the minor technicality of having played for somebody else. Alessandro del Piero, denied his status thanks to his antipodean and subcontinental adventures. John Terry, his true-blueness forever lost thanks to a few early loan appearances for Nottingham Forest. Bobby Charlton, of Manchester United (and, er, Preston North End. And Waterford).
Basically, we have a choice. If we insist on the strict definition of 'one-club player', then we're choosing to have it represent an interesting subset of footballers who played for one club and one club only. And we should also acknowledge that their doing so was as much a consequence of any number of external, uncontrollable factors as it was their extreme devotion, their superior fidelity. That it was, in large part, nothing to do with them. That it's as much a curiosity as compliment; as much a point of trivia as an achievement. Which is fine. Trivia's great.
But if the idea of a one-club player is to mean anything bigger, if it's to have some non-trivial significance, then we need to abandon the categorical puritanism. We could, perhaps, choose to read it as shorthand for 'one club-above-all-others players'. That way, we can allow the term to encompass all the positive things it's supposed to — loyalty, commitment, some kind of special relationship — but at the same expand the notion to include Gerrard and Terry, Charlton and Del Piero. To take in all those other footballers who feel like one-club players, whatever early loans and late adventures their Wikipedia entries may insist took place. It's nice when words mean what they say. But it's better when they mean what they should.
Source SBNation.com - All Posts http://ift.tt/1Fur2Xo
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