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Steven Gerrard

with Donald McRae

M Y S T O R Y

Contents

Prologue: Slipping Away

1 The Stand-Off

2 Changing Seasons

3 Tangled Celebrations

4 Qualifications and Positions

5 Hard Facts

6 The Surge

7 Closing In

8 The Slip

9 England: The Hope

10 England: The End

11 The Merry-Go-Round

12 Contracts, Decisions and the Night of the 8-Iron

13 Wonder Goals and Injury Blues

14 The Chimp, the Stamp and the Letter

15 Dreaming

16 The Leaving of Liverpool

Illustrations

Appendix: A Career in Numbers

Picture Permissions

Ack nowledgements

Follow Penguin

For My Family and Friends

Author ’s Note

My first book, Gerrard , was published in 2006. This new book concentrates on recent events and offers further reflections on my twenty-seven-year career with Liverpool, and fourteen years with England, alongside a more personal analysis of some of the high and low points that have shaped my life.

Prologue: Slipping Away

Liverpool, Sunday, 27 April 2014

I sat in the back of the car and felt the tears rolling down my face. I hadn’t cried for years but, on the way home, I couldn’t stop. The tears kept coming on a sunlit evening in Liverpool. It was very quiet as we moved further and further away from Anfield. I can’t remember now how long that journey lasted. I can’t even tell you if the streets were thick with traffic or as empty as I was on the inside. It was killing me.

An hour earlier, after the Chelsea game, I’d wanted to disappear down a dark hole. Our second-last home match of the season was meant to have been the title-clincher. We had beaten our closest rivals, Manchester City, in the previous game at Anfield. We had just reeled off our eleventh straight win. One more victory and we would be almost certain to win the league for the first time since May 1990.

Twenty-four years earlier, in the month I turned ten, that team of me and my dad’s dreams had been managed by Kenny Dalglish and captained by Alan Hansen. It was also the team of McMahon and Molby, of Beardsley and Rush, of Whelan and Barnes.

I was dreaming of today even then, as a boy who had joined the Liverpool Academy at the age of eight and wished and prayed that, one day, he might also win the league in front of the Kop. My first-team debut came in 1998, when I was eighteen and I had no idea how it might feel to be a thirty-three-year-old man crying in the back of a car.

I felt numb, like I had lost someone in my family.

It was as if my whole quarter of a century at this football club poured out of me. I did not even try to stem the silent tears as the events of the afternoon played over and over again in my head.

In the last minute of the first half against a cagey Chelsea, set up to stop our rush to glory by José Mourinho, it happened. A simple pass rolled towards me near the halfway line. It was a nothing moment, a lull in our surge to the title. I moved to meet the ball. It slid under my foot.

The twist came then. I slipped. I fell to the ground.