Steven Gerrard can probably guess part of the soundtrack. He has heard it already in his brief reign as Aston Villa manager.
When Manchester City took a 2-0 lead during Gerrard’s first defeat, their fans started singing about Demba Ba and a certain infamous slip, which permitted Manuel Pellegrini’s team to win the Premier League in 2014. The chances are that the Chelsea supporters will need no reminding of it. Expect to hear about it at Villa Park on Boxing Day.
Gerrard and Chelsea have a long and complicated history. He was sent off in Liverpool’s 2-1 final-day defeat to the Blues in May 2003, allowing Chelsea to finish fourth. Without Champions League football, would Roman Abramovich have bought them?
There was his unstoppable headed own goal in the 2005 League Cup final, which Liverpool led for 78 minutes but brought Jose Mourinho his first trophy in England. There were two Champions League semi-finals Liverpool won at Anfield, Luis Garcia’s ghost goal rendering the heroics of Istanbul possible and Gerrard setting up Daniel Agger’s goal before scoring for Rafa Benitez’s side in the 2007 penalty shootout.
There was the 2014 meeting, when Mourinho fielded a weakened team, Gerrard’s long quest to win the title was on the brink of being realised, when he took a poor touch, lost his footing and Ba raced away to score.
But while Gerrard faces Chelsea for the first time as a manager on Sunday, the great alternative history of his career entailed him joining them.
Chelsea came calling twice, in 2004 and 2005, when they were furnished with Abramovich’s funds, when Liverpool had lesser players. Gerrard was tempted, especially in 2005. The loyalty he ultimately showed to his hometown club cemented his legend; Jamie Carragher argued recently that it makes him Liverpool’s greatest ever player, though perhaps his deeds on the pitch were enough to do that.
It ended up being a self-sacrificial move. Gerrard concluded that one trophy with Liverpool was worth several elsewhere but he only won two in his last decade at Anfield, one of them almost single-handedly. His last six seasons, apart from the unexpected title charge in 2013/14, contained too many anti-climactic moments.
He was fighting against a descent into mediocrity, playing with Paul Konchesky and David Ngog and Lazar Markovic and Charlie Adam and a host of others who were outclassed by their captain. He had watched Fernando Torres and Xabi Alonso and Javier Mascherano go, he realised Luis Suarez would follow and he stayed, until his Premier League career ended in a 6-1 thrashing at Stoke.
None of which would have happened had he joined Chelsea. He would not have been the greatest Premier League player never to win the Premier League: he might have been a multiple champion. Certainly, he and Jose Mourinho formed a mutual admiration society – the Portuguese sent him a handwritten letter congratulating him on his Liverpool career in 2015 – and the combination of a manager and a player at their peak in 2005 could have been sensational.
Maybe Mourinho’s Chelsea would have won the Champions League. Maybe Chelsea would have been so strong that Sir Alex Ferguson did not have such a remarkable late-career renaissance. Add Gerrard to Petr Cech, John Terry, Didier Drogba, Claude Makelele, Frank Lampard, Ricardo Carvalho, Arjen Robben and Damien Duff, assume they would still have signed Ashley Cole and then kept Mourinho and the dominant team of the late 2000s may have been in London, not Manchester.
And certainly, Mourinho would have resolved the conundrum that confounded England managers. Lampard and Gerrard could have played together, with the Liverpudlian taking the role that Michael Ballack, Michael Essien or Tiago actually occupied in the Portuguese’s 4-3-3 with Makelele doing the donkey work, much as Kevin de Bruyne and David Silva could combine in a midfield that Fernandinho anchored. Makelele could have released each to attack, without the kind of uneasy compromises they had when paired on international duty. In turn, it might have led England to eschew 4-4-2 rather earlier, to install a specialist holding midfielder and unleash two attacking No. 8s.
Had Gerrard joined Chelsea, of course, there would be no widespread assumption now that his path automatically led back to Anfield. Perhaps he, and not Lampard, would have been the favourite son Chelsea turned to when they needed a manager in 2019.
But Gerrard took the route that enabled him to remain true to himself: it was not paved with silverware but it means that rather than being celebrated by Chelsea supporters, he will be taunted by them.
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