There's a good reason why football managers love nothing more than to gather their players together and make them listen to Al Pacino's "inches" speech from Any Given Sunday. It's because nothing like that speech has been heard in a real dressing room in the history of sport.
Usually a team talk aims to do nothing more than remind the players about a couple of basic tasks. Sky Sports asked Louis van Gaal what he'd say to his players before they played Liverpool at Anfield. Van Gaal replied that his message would be short and simple. "Like: 'Show yourselves'. Or: 'no red cards. Because it will be a sharp duel.'"
Oliver Stone is never going to make a movie where the coach says that sort of stuff, but Van Gaal is experienced enough to know that before a big game, the manager’s job is usually to calm his players down rather than to wind them up. He’s better off pointing out a couple of quite obvious things, rather than trying to tap into his players’ emotional core.
Emotional core
We don’t know whether
Brendan Rodgers
made any effort to calm
Steven Gerrard
down before sending him out to play the second half yesterday. Probably he thought a veteran of more than 800 matches wouldn’t need special attention. But it’s unlikely that anything Rodgers said could have made any difference. Gerrard’s emotional core had already been tapped by 2,600 Manchester United fans in the Anfield Road end, and not in a good way.
After Juan Mata’s first goal left the home crowd dumbstruck, the United supporters had run through their anti-Gerrard repertoire with sustained and gleeful malice. There was the usual Demba Ba song: “He slipped on his f***ing a**e”, and there was a variation on Liverpool’s “And now you’re gonna believe us” title-chasing chant: “You nearly won the league . . . then Gerrard f***ed it up.”
As the mocking chorus boomed on, you wondered if any other player has had his nose rubbed so much in such a painful, career-defining mistake.
In 1999, at Villa Park, Patrick Vieira passed the ball to Ryan Giggs and, as United fans have sung ever since, “Arsenal won f**k all”. But it was only the FA Cup that slipped away from Vieira that night, rather than the last great hope of his footballing life. Vieira and Arsenal went on to win a few more leagues and cups. His last kick of the ball in an Arsenal shirt won them an FA Cup final against Manchester United. So Vieira recovered and redeemed himself from that mistake; even United fans wouldn’t say it defined his career. Gerrard has not been so lucky.
Another difference is that Vieira only heard the song from Manchester United supporters, who, after all, were simultaneously celebrating a brilliant goal from one of their own. Gerrard hears the songs everywhere he goes. His slip won a match for Chelsea and a title for Manchester City, but fans from Manchester United to Arsenal to Everton to Crystal Palace now gloat over his pain.
It’s an example of the amplifying effect of social media, which means crowds everywhere have been exposed to the same messages and influences, everyone has seen the same gifs and the same vines: everyone is in on the joke. For the individual at the epicentre, there is no escape.
But if the mechanisms underlying a mass campaign of ridicule are distinctively modern, the emotions of shame and rage have been overpowering rational thought since prehistoric times. It looked as though Gerrard – who’s never been the coolest thinker in the game – took the field bent on revenge. The urge to silence the tormentors immediately boiled over in an incontinent outburst of aggression, and after 38 seconds he was walking back off, in a scene that might have been tragic had it not been so farcical.
Blame
The thought may have crossed Rodgers’s mind that at least he had somebody with whom to share the blame. But while Gerrard short-circuited Liverpool’s hopes of getting back into the match, he bears no responsibility for the way they were dominated in the first half. Once again, Liverpool faltered when it mattered most.
Since Rodgers took over at Liverpool, he has won only five of 26 matches against the big four of Chelsea, Arsenal and the Manchester clubs. He’s never beaten Chelsea, and he’s lost five out of seven against Manchester United. He’s won only one of six against Arsenal, who Liverpool must beat in their next league match to get back into the Champions League race. Under Rodgers Liverpool have usually won the games they’re expected to win, and no more.
Over the weekend, articles appeared in English newspapers detailing how Rodgers had turned Liverpool’s season around. In this version of events, the manager had masterminded the recovery largely on his own, with minimal input from staff.
There were also claims that Rodgers would not be interested if his admirers at Manchester City or England offered him a job – as long as he believed that winning the title at Liverpool was possible. Was this a shot across the bows of the Liverpool board? Hard to say; but one thing is certain: as long as Liverpool keep losing the biggest games, they have no more chance of winning the league than does their departing captain.
