Football fans have a tendency to put way too much faith in the player they see as their club's best. From an early age we put their pictures on our bedroom walls, despite the fact that they are some of the least aesthetically-pleasant creatures. We buy football boots with their signatures on
We start to believe our club's success or failure depends wholly on one or two top players. We often rightly think that we'll be rubbish without them, but that's precisely the problem. The top players often help hide our club's other weaknesses and excuse them from strengthening in depth. There's plenty of evidence to suggest that when a club gets or develops a really massive talent, it actually gives or creates problems that they often fail to solve. It's not inevitable, but it does tend to happen.
Here's the evidence. When you've got a brilliant player in your team, the club becomes totally over-dependent on that player for success. The floor-wiping success of Thierry Henry at Arsenal has, it would seem, retarded their development or signing of other strikers in past years. And on occasion they seem to lack an alternative game plan if Henry isn't getting any success.
They've been lucky that Henry hasn't had a long-term serious injury and his run of good form has been almost unparalleled, but its only now that Arsenal seem to be waking up to their lightweight back-up and how vulnerable it can make them if Henry is injured or not on top form and they don't have different options.
Similarly, Ruud Van Nistelrooy's first two goal-filled seasons hid the fact that Man United didn't have any other really goal-rich strikers and to be fair, while he was banging them in, they didn't need anyone else - but his injury last season and lack of form exposed just how much they had relied on him to bail them out when games were tight or to turn a draw into a win. Ferguson clearly realised this a year ago but despite good signings has still not really sorted it out.
Liverpool, for what seemed like a decade, relied on Michael Owen to score the goals. In fact, for a while our only tactic seemed to be kick it long to Owen to run really fast and hope he scores. There was much gnashing of teeth when he was sold. Our greatest asset and goalscorer, gone.
But of course it meant that we had to think of another plan and oh, we won the Champions League by doing so and, you could argue, did so without a striker who is anywhere near as good as Owen. So Owen going was nothing but good for Liverpool. We didn't need what many assumed was their best player.
The exact same things were being said of Stevie Gerrard. Surely Liverpool should be building the side around him and offering him anything he wants. Well, who knows how it's being resolved? First he was going and now he's staying, maybe in an hour he'll be going if the money gets bigger. Anyone would think Stevie G is suffering from PMT with these kind of mood swings.
But everyone is replaceable. It's been proved time after time.
Chelsea in recent years have had some great players, but only won the league because they had a great team that played as a team and didn't rely too much on any one or two players to win games. And that's the crucial bit, having a great team outweighs having one or more great players many times over, as Real Madrid keep finding out.
Every club worries about losing its best players but there is a lot to be said for cashing in on them if you can. To my mind, £35million for Gerrard would be immeasurably more useful to Rafa Benitez than Gerrard himself. Gerrard is not the equal of five seven million quid players - that's the bald fact. And while him staying might seem like a good idea, I wonder if it is really in the long term. If Chelsea come back with £40million if I were Rick Parry (an unpleasant thought, I know) then I'd bite not only their hand off but their entire arm and some of the shoulder too.
It would of course be madness to sell your best players all the time if you can't replace them with someone good. But it is far from the throat-cutting end-of-the-world scenario that some fans often portray. Teams can grow complacent that their big hitters will do the job and stop working as hard.
So since Gerrard wanted and probably got even more money despite being paid massive cash already, I say, let some other sucker pay it. I said take the money and run. Sure, Gerrard is good, and on occasions brilliant, but I'm not alone in thinking he goes missing in big games too often and since Liverpool have Xabi Alonso, a pretty good replacement already on the books on probably less than half the money, there is nothing to worry about at all in cashing in on your asset - especially when you can buy half a team with the money you'd get.
Players are quick to believe their own hype and exploit it. We just feed their delusions by suggesting they're irreplaceable and that the club should do anything the player wants just to keep them. In Gerrard's case he couldn't make the excuse any longer that he'd be moving "to win things", having just won the CL. He's playing for his hometown club he loves so much, so he says, so the only reason he could have been moving was for more money and when your club is already paying him upwards of 70k a week and offering 30k more, that rightly stuck in the fans' throats.
Perhaps waving him goodbye immediately without fuss or remorse was the best thing Liverpool fans could have done. It would have set an example to other players who are frankly, badge-kissing hypocrites, that we won't be conned by them anymore.
The more we pander to our best players, the more we wring our hands and get hysterical about them if it looks like their going to leave, the more we'll be held to ransom by them and their agents for money that frankly they neither need nor deserve. And in doing so, who knows, maybe become Cyclops
Pickers! Well, maybe.
