Steven Gerrard's slip cost Liverpool the Premier League – he's wrong to have any faith in lady luck making amends
The Liverpool captain thinks moments of bad luck even itself out over the course of a season. If only human existence was as fundamentally fair as that
4:31PM BST 31 Jul 2014
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The new season of what continues ever more satirically to style itself “the best league in the world” begins on Aug 16, and before dusk settles on that opening Saturday there is every chance that a commentator will have given voice to one of the imbecilities of the trade.
Be it Jonathan Pearce, Alan Green or another refugee from the All Souls’ high table, somebody will seek to place in perspective a piece of rank observation: “What you have to remember is that these things balance out over the course of the season”.
Variants on this theme are heard across the sporting spectrum – they might be inspired by a net cord at Wimbledon or a fluked pot at the Crucible – and it is easy to appreciate why.
In spite of overwhelming evidence, we all want to believe that human existence is fundamentally fair.
Yet as Steven Gerrard’s brave if morose reflections on the catastrophe that befell him in April underline, nothing could be more misguided than any faith in the law of averages as an enforcer of cosmic justice.
It may dictate that instances of good and back luck will approximately even themselves out over time, but that is irrelevant. What matters is not the numbers, but the context.
A penalty kick wrongly awarded to a team winning 4-0 in the third round of the FA Cup is not precisely counterbalanced by a penalty mistakenly given in its favour with the scores tied in the dying moments of the final.
Even were it the case that on average every steeplechaser will do the splits once in a career, this would hardly have comforted Dick Francis or the Queen Mother after Devon Loch’s legs splayed with the Grand National winning post in sight, rather than in the first furlong of a selling plate at Haydock.
Speaking in New York during Liverpool’s pre-season tour, Gerrard said that “every single person on the planet slips at some point in their life”, and so they no doubt do.
But slipping while weeding the garden is one thing, doing so on the precipice of Beachy Head is another, and slipping to enable Chelsea’s Demba Ba to score the goal that cost Liverpool the Premier Leaguetitle another still.
Given a choice between the latter two, Gerrard might well have taken the Beachy Head option, however mightily he strives to make sense of the wholly senseless.
“Over the course of 38 games, a lot happens for you and against you,” he posited in New York, “and that determines whether you win the league or not.”
If only that were so. In this unique case, what determined the outcome of an unusually thrilling race in Manchester City’s favour was a pure and malevolent accident.
When John Terry slipped while running up to take what would have been the winning kick for Chelsea in the 2008 Champions League final penalty shoot-out eventually won by Manchester United, and hit a post, one assumed that he buckled under the stress.
With Stevie G, there was no hint of an overwrought subconscious toying malevolently with his footing.
A long, impressive and sporadically glorious club career came to be defined by a microsecond of random chance, and the cruelty of that cannot be exaggerated.
He speaks about the trauma, which plainly dwarfs the disappointment of his accident prone international swansong in Brazil, with a dignity that cannot disguise that the effects linger.
“When something like that happens, you have to face it up and be man enough to take it on the chin. Accept it happened. You can’t change it.”
The poignancy of his attempt to normalise the arbitrary freakishness with “something like that” is fearsome, but nothing like that ever happened before and nothing like it will probably never will again, and the Zen master known to his brother monks as Old Mellow would find it almost impossible to accept that.
“The league is going to be very, very tough but we know we are one of the sides that has got a genuine chance of winning it,” Gerrard went on. “I believe that.”
Good luck to him if he really does. If there were any justice, he would lead Liverpool to their first title since 1990 in the season about to begin.
As he knows better than most, of course, there isn’t.
