It was a slip. The slip. But there was so much more to it.
That
touch on the turn. You know the one. You have dropped into centre-half,
the ball comes square from left-back. You pivot 180 and get the
slightest touch to set it up. More a caress than a trap. You move it
right.
Its purpose? It takes one second rather than two.
Keep the ball moving. Switch play. Stretch midfields. It happens 50
times in a game. Fifty-eight times in this particular game. Steven
Gerrard does it in his sleep.
Tomas
Kalas – remember him? It's his first half of Premier League football
and he has just headed wide unmarked from a corner. Martin Tyler lets
out that nervous yelp he reserves for late April. Kalas kicks the post
in frustration. Warning sign.
Liverpool set up from the
goal kick with Gerrard deep. That was Brendan Rodgers' way with the
ball. Gerrard was the extra man in a three-man defence and the
centre-halves would split. It worked.
Mamadou Sakho is
left of Gerrard, Jon Flanagan pushed up. From midfield, Philippe
Coutinho lays it to Sakho, immediately turning to add to the growing
Liverpool options higher up the pitch. Joe Allen also pushes up.
Steven
Gerrard is last man. No concerns there. One of the best passers in
Premier League history, with a godly touch. Sakho knows. He lets Gerrard
take over. Liverpool's main man.
He's not looking to
knock this on harmlessly to Martin Skrtel, beside him at right
centre-half. He's looking to jab it to Lucas Leiva, an island in
Chelsea's half having dropped five yards to give Gerrard an angle. Lucas
will take this and pump it forward. It's obvious Liverpool are
committing. Thirty-five seconds until the whistle, they are allowed to.
Gerrard
wants to get this done quickly. It's 0-0 in first-half stoppage time in
the biggest game of the season and Liverpool have been flat. You see
most of the ball at centre-half, after all.
Liverpool's aim is to get into half-time ahead. It's their way. The first-half blitz was their trademark.
The
ball rolls to Gerrard. In the excitement, the anxiety, the nerves, the
occasion, Gerrard lifts his head, back foot and front foot all at once.
He's not looking at the ball, but he does not need to. He does this in
his sleep, remember. He's desperate to feed Lucas at double speed, to
catch Chelsea off guard. A sucker punch to settle the nerves. To put a
hand and four fingers on the title.
He does it all too
quickly. The ball, now supporting Manchester City, finds a millimetre
gap under his front foot. The brush of a stud would have slowed it.
There was no brush of a stud. The turf is zippy.
"They’ve been watering it all day, literally," said Ed Chamberlin.
"It is very slippy! We nearly got washed out a few times doing interviews," said Niall Quinn.
Then panic.
Demba
Ba, who had been "feeding off crumbs" [Gary Neville] all afternoon
jolts into life, 10 yards from the ball. You can imagine Jose Mourinho
telling Ba to harass Liverpool's centre-backs. Skrtel and Sakho are not
the best on the ball, after all. But he would have never expected this.
Not with Gerrard.
Gerrard's eyebrows are now up with his
hairline. So are everyone's. The ball is now two yards away from
Gerrard, five away from Ba. The odds are with Gerrard, just.
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Desperate
to catch up, slide in, scythe Ba, anything, Gerrard pushes off from his
left, studs firmly in the Anfield turf. He's barely finished flicking
off from his left when he tries to plant his right, like the back feet
of a horse's gallop. Try running like that while bending down at a
45-degree angle. Go on. You will hit the deck nine times out of 10.
And with this, he's off balance. Ba is three yards away.
Anfield is now an ice rink and his right skate barely scrapes the ground. He's in mid-air, gone.
Ba is two yards away.
Ba is one yard away.
Ba is on the ball and Gerrard is barely back on his feet.
Inside Anfield, the only sound you can hear is Chelsea fans. That familiar "Go on!" Otherwise, silence.
Like the red arrows, Sakho, Gerrard and Skrtel are on to Ba. But touch one, two and three are expert.
Simon
Mignolet's approach appears textbook. Reduce the gap immediately, stay
standing, symmetrical and just inside your area. But it has been
criticised. Ba puts it the only place he can: through Mignolet's legs.
"You’re
looking at your 'keeper and thinking: 'Come on, win us the league. Make
that save that’s going to be a defining moment in the season'," said Jamie Carragher months later.
Even
years later, Gary Neville agreed. "I think it’s a scuffed shot from
Demba Ba, I don't think he looks confident. It goes in and nobody ever
blamed Mignolet for that goal."
Ba celebrates
respectfully. Jon Obi Mikel doesn't. Ironically, Mohamed Salah is there
in a huddle to congratulate the goalscorer. Mourinho looks smug. It's
the most meaningful-meaningless goal of his managerial career. He has
history with Liverpool fans.
"It’s typical Mourinho, typical Chelsea," says Neville on co-commentary.
"But it is not typical Gerrard," says Tyler.
It was a slip. The slip. But there was so much more to it.
Premier
League titles are decided by an accumulation of thousands of incidents,
many equal in weight. Injuries, refereeing decisions, last-minute goals
and missed sitters. Most are forgotten.
Remember Dejan
Lovren's winner for Southampton at Anfield in September 2013, after he
was lucky not to give away a penalty? Or Vito Mannone letting Samir
Nasri's shot squirm out of his hands to give Manchester City a point
against Sunderland later in the season? No, nor did I until I looked
them up just now.
Or Kolo Toure laying on Victor
Anichebe to grab a point for West Brom in February 2014? Or Cheick
Tiote's contentious disallowed equaliser for Newcastle against City a
few weeks before? Nope. Google.
That's what makes Gerrard’s slip so remarkable. Theatrically, it's as perfect as it is unfair.
Just
two weeks before, after a 3-2 win over City at Anfield which swung the
title race in Liverpool’s favour, Gerrard's post-match speech was picked
up by the microphones. That in itself is rare.
After holding back tears of joy, Gerrard gave his rallying cry.
"Hey,
this does not f****** slip now. This does not f****** slip. Listen,
listen, This is gone. We go Norwich. Exactly the same. We go again. Come
on!"
The irony does not need explaining. Nor does Gerrard need reminding.
"I
wish I could go back to that day [against City]" Gerrard said in 2017.
"If I could rewind the clock that would be the day I would go back to
and try and go the other way with a bit of calmness and a bit of
realisation where we were at that time.
"It was passion,
emotion and it was real and I felt in the moment we did need that. But
now, in hindsight, I would probably have gone a bit more calmer and
realised who we still had to play."
Premier League table before Liverpool's defeat
After
that win, Liverpool sat seven points ahead of City, who had two games
in hand. City then drew one of their games in hand against Sunderland,
then Liverpool won at Norwich, then City beat West Brom.
At 2.05pm before the Chelsea game, Liverpool were six points ahead of City, who had a game in hand.
By
7pm, it was three points – and a goal difference considerably in City's
favour – after they capitalised on Gerrard's slip with a 2-0 win at
Palace.
Premier League table after Liverpool defeat and Man City win at Crystal Palace
City
won their other game in hand, and in fact all three remaining games,
taking the title by two points. That huge slip-up at Selhurst Park was
dramatic - Liverpool threw away a three-goal lead and Luis Suarez cried -
but it did not change the destination of the title. Sadly for Gerrard,
his slip did.
"That was the most difficult day in my
life and still is," Gerrard said in 2017. "No matter what happens to me
to the day I die that will be the most difficult day of my life because
it is difficult to erase it. It was a tough time.
"To
this day it still haunts me a bit, it still hurts. I’m the type of
person that setbacks drive me on. I won't give up trying to make up for
that as long as I live. With the Chelsea one the reason I can’t accept
it is because it was bad luck.
"If I had given a pass
away or tried a turn and got it wrong or scored an own goal I wouldn’t
be able to live with myself or deal with it. When it is a stroke of bad
luck I have to get on with it and try to make it amends for it."
Among
the expressions in the Kop as Ba scores, one stands out. Look
carefully. In the first image, one Liverpool fan has already turned
before the ball reaches the net. A flat out denial of what is going on
behind them.
Chelsea
won 2-0, Willian sealing it late on, prompting Mourinho to run down the
touchline like they themselves had won the title. In fact, they were
back in it for a moment, but a draw against Norwich a week later killed
their chances.
Mourinho saw it differently.
"Our
position was the sub-position," he said months later. "That match, for
us, meant just professional pride. You have to go for every game and try
to win, but we were not in the race. It was just a match that gave the
title to Manchester City."
It showed in his team
selection. Mourinho made six changes, including replacing Gary Cahill
with Kalas, who had previously said he was "a player for training
sessions… if they need a cone, they put me there."
But Chelsea packed in, played six defenders, and parked two buses, according to Rodgers. They took their time from minute one.
"Chelsea
have done a job on Liverpool," said Neville in co-commentary. "It feels
like every five minutes has been planned out meticulously by Jose
Mourinho."
Nobody
had done more to drag Liverpool into the title race. But after the
mistake, Gerrard was reduced to trying speculative efforts from range in
an attempt to make up for it.
You can understand his
thinking. If one goes in, he's praised for his audacity in the face of
impending trauma. But the simple pass was on, again and again.
The post-mortem was instant, and has lasted years.
"I’ve
never been able to say this in public before but I was seriously
concerned that we thought we could blow Chelsea away," Gerrard said in
his 2015 book ‘My Story’. "I sensed an over-confidence in Brendan's team
talks. We played into Chelsea's hands. I feared it then and I know it
now."
Rodgers replied in 2018. "I don’t think I was more or less confident," he told The Times. "We’d won 11 on the bounce. You want to go in with confidence."
Whether
an attempted shift of blame or not, Gerrard felt the full impact of his
mistake. In ‘My Story’ he recalls the hours that followed.
"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. 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.
"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."
The mocking of Gerrard
was relentless in the following year. In the same fixture seven months
later, a horse by the name of Gerrard’s Slip ran in the 12.40 at
Doncaster.
In one of his final games for Liverpool, at
Stamford Bridge in May 2015, Chelsea fans did applaud Gerrard as he left
the pitch, but the midfielder’s message was clear.
“I
was more happy with the ovation from the Liverpool fans. The Chelsea
fans showed respect for a couple of seconds for me but slaughtered me
all game so I’m not going to get drawn into wishing the Chelsea fans
well. It’s nice of them to turn up for once today.”
Liverpool
are chasing the crown again, the first since 1990. Only five current
Liverpool players were born when they last won it, and only Jordan
Henderson, Simon Mignolet and Daniel Sturridge were involved in 2014.
No
love has been lost between the two sides, and those inside Anfield on
Sunday won’t need reminding of the events of five years ago. Those
events, after all, are part of why this is so big for Liverpool.
It's
No Mistakes time, but how do you manage that? Truth is, you can't. Be
too cautious and the crowd get nervy. Too attacking and Chelsea have the
quality to pick you off. Somewhere in-between still comes with its
risks.
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