Back to the day job: Steven Gerrard was back in
action for Liverpool in a pre-season game against Merseyside rivals
Tranmere
A wave of relief surged across football's motherland on
Friday as one of its shining knights was cleared of criminal
thuggery and sent galloping on his way to yet more deeds of
derring.
It was unthinkable that Steven Gerrard should be kicking nothing
better than his heels in one of Her Majesty's over-crowded prison
cells next summer while his England team strain for World Cup glory
in South Africa without him.
The guttural roar of mindless acclamation to which the mob gave
vent outside Liverpool Crown
Court yesterday rang through public hostelries everywhere, from the
chic salons of London town to the trattorias of Capello-ville.
For Stevie G is the St George of English football. Yet
it is this esteemed position he holds in the national psyche which
makes this matter so disturbing.
St George should be slaying dragons, not getting caught up in a
seedy nightclub brawl. Our hero should be rallying the nation to
the cause, not getting himself acquitted by a jury of his
Merseyside brothers and sisters in a celebrity trial.
The local lad turned multi-millionaire - bearer of Anfield's
ambitions and England's dreams - who knocked out another man's
tooth with one of three unanswered uppercuts, was cleared of affray
in a Southport bar in December last year. Six of his friends
admitted charges related to the brawl and will be sentenced next
month.
Intense interest: Gerrard speaks to the media
throng outside Liverpool Crown Court
This was certainly a triumph for expedience. The shouts
of 'Come On Rocky' which greeted Gerrard's emergence from court
were not so much funny as raucous confirmation of that worrying
contradiction.What makes this case all the more demoralising is the
identity of its central character.
Of all the players on the Shakespearean stage which is the
Premier League, Gerrard comes across as one of the most honest,
likeable and cleancut. We have not associated this particular
footballer with the preening peacocks of the game who hurry from
the playing fields of England to London's depressingly trendy
hang-outs of the louche and famous; certainly not with those who
have been accused of 'roasting' stupid girl groupies.
Nor - even though we would expect him to like a celebration
drink as much as the next red-blooded young Englishman - do we
picture him slumped in the gutters of this country's drunken
Saturday nights.
Free man: The Liverpool and England star was found
not guilty of affray
He showed the better side of his character only weeks
ago in his dignified acceptance of the Footballer of the Year
award. His pride at following in the line of such legends as
Matthews, Finney, Wright, Moore and Charlton shone through his
speech.
Yet that is what makes this grubby episode especially
disappointing. Gerrard has been as much the role model for today's
youngsters as those icons of generations past.
For our latter-day St George to be sucked into the gratuitous
egomania which has become the self-aggrandising culture of the
modern footballer is enough to make us weep. Gerrard was cleared
but the images which came out of that club in Southport - those of
a booze-swigging, shot-slugging, punchthrowing yob - betrayed our
trust in him. Gerrard apologised for his conduct and expressed
gratitude for the verdict. Yet words alone are not enough.
It is by his actions in the coming weeks, months and years that
we will judge him, judge him more profoundly than he was in that
star-struck chamber in his home town. By that and the company he
keeps.
Honoured: Gerrard is arguably one of the best
footballers in the world and even collected an MBE in 2007
