Ahead of each Premier League campaign, various players are supposedly set for a "make-or-break" year, according to season previews.
The player in question is usually a young footballer who has been around for a few seasons but hasn't fulfilled his initial promise, prompting questions about his long-term future. Jack Wilshere, for example, has had at least three "make-or-break" seasons in succession, which essentially summarises how the situation doesn't make sense for a player of his age. There's always another year, another chance.
Make-or-break years apply better with veterans. Then, there's often no second chance, no opportunity to redeem themselves. When it comes to achieving their career goals, it's now or never -- or, if you like, make or break.
A perfect example was Steven Gerrard's 2014. It's difficult to think of an established player enjoying, or enduring, such a tumultuous year. Gerrard's legacy as a Liverpool legend was confirmed long ago. The events of 2014 would decide Gerrard's true standing in football: as a widely admired club legend with a couple of asterisks against his name, or an undisputed champion.
As Gerrard woke on the morning of Jan. 1, 2014, he had no idea how eventful the year would be. At that stage, Liverpool were fifth in the Premier League, one point behind city rivals Everton, and therefore roughly where everyone expected. There were few signs a title challenge was around the corner.
Gerrard's first league start of 2014 was significant. For the trip to Stoke City, Brendan Rodgers planned to use his captain in an all-new role: at the base of a three-man midfield, the position popularised by Andrea Pirlo. Gerrard had played in a defensive midfield role as a tough-tackling, energetic youngster, but gradually became more comfortable higher up the pitch, showcasing his dynamism, creativity and goal-scoring ability.
This was an enormous transformation. As rumours of Liverpool's tactical shift gathered on the morning of the game, it was difficult to believe a player frequently criticised for his lack of tactical discipline would be trusted in the deepest midfield role. When the team sheet was released, and Lucas Leiva started, it seemed unlikely the Brazilian would be deployed in a box-to-box role with Gerrard behind him.
But that's precisely what happened, with Lucas returning to the role where he made his name in Brazil, and Gerrard as the deep-lying playmaker.
That contest at the Britannia was bonkers -- there was no shape to the game, it was end-to-end throughout and featured four goals in either half. It was 2-2 by halftime and 5-3 Liverpool at full time. Liverpool had prevailed, not necessarily because they functioned better as a team, but because they had superior individuals in the final third. This match defined Liverpool for the rest of the season: it was all-out attack. If you score three, we'll score five.
For Gerrard, too, it set the tone. Defensively he was suspect, narrowly avoiding an own goal thanks to a superb Simon Mignolet save. Yet his attack-minded mentality suited Liverpool's offensive game plan, and he also scored a penalty, a key theme of his 2014: on the score sheet despite contributing little in open play. Of his 17 goals in the calendar year, 12 were penalties, three were free kicks and another was a header from a corner.
Nevertheless, Gerrard was widely praised for his performance. "He has got the personality to play in that controlling role," said Rodgers after the game. "He gives us great variety in his passing. We saw today he picked it up from deep and stretched the game with his vision and quality."
That was now Gerrard's role, and for all his defensive inadequacies, his leadership was vital throughout this period, especially considering the retirement of Jamie Carragher the previous summer. Liverpool's captain was substituted only three times until the end of the campaign, always at a stage when Liverpool were at least three goals ahead.
The following match, at home against Aston Villa, displayed the problem with Gerrard in front of the defence. He didn't position himself well enough to receive passes to start attacks (something Lucas is very good at, even if he lacks Gerrard's passing range) and Villa dominated, going 2-0 up. Then, Rodgers rejigged and pushed Gerrard further up. Here, he inspired a fight back from his more traditional position, and inevitably scored the equaliser from the penalty spot in a 2-2 draw.
At some point, Rodgers decided Liverpool would attempt to blitz opponents in the opening minutes. This suited Gerrard; although he didn't have the mobility of his younger years, he could still turn in excellent short bursts, help put Liverpool on the attack and then sit back and conserve energy.
Liverpool's key victories during this period came in staggeringly open matches, but this suited a side with Luis Suarez and Daniel Sturridge, the Premier League's two top goal scorers that campaign. There's an element of chicken and egg here, of course, but Rodgers' system almost felt accidental, an attempt to cram all his best attacking talents into the team at the expense of discipline.
For the 4-0 win over Everton, for example, he played Gerrard, Jordan Henderson, Philippe Coutinho, Raheem Sterling, Suarez and Sturridge. That's basically three attacking midfielders and three forwards.
The opening blitzes worked incredibly well, though. They were 3-0 up vs. Everton inside 35 minutes, 4-0 up vs. Arsenal inside 20, 2-0 up vs. Swansea inside 20, 2-0 up vs. Tottenham inside 25. Sometimes they faded in the second half, but they'd already won the game. The pattern continued, with a few exceptions, right up until the 3-2 victory over Manchester City, one of the most intense games in Premier League history, almost forgotten because of the subsequent match against Chelsea.
Even when Liverpool were winning, however, there was a concern about Gerrard in that deep role. Liverpool somehow managed a 3-0 victory over Southampton in St Mary's on a horrible, cold Saturday evening despite Gerrard being given the runaround by future teammate Adam Lallana. Had Lallana scored, rather than hit the post, from point-blank range toward the end of the first half, Gerrard's problems might have been highlighted more widely.
The 5-1 thrashing of Arsenal summarised Gerrard and Liverpool. Gerrard's main contribution was from dead balls, curling in two excellent free kicks for Martin Skrtel to head in. But he was actually the least important member of Liverpool's midfield or attack and struggled defensively, bringing down Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain with a clumsy tackle, for a Mikel Arteta consolation from the spot.
Yet it was still working. Liverpool had won 5-1, after all. Football isn't always about logic; it's also about emotion, determination and maybe even fate. And those three things were on Gerrard's side, right until the infamous match against Chelsea.
Liverpool went into that game, typically, with two consecutive 3-2 wins when they'd started strongly, gone ahead, lost control but squeezed over the line. Against Chelsea, however, they faced a challenge they hadn't really encountered all season, against a team determined to sit back, soak up pressure and presumably play for a 0-0. This appeared to be something no one had truly considered.
It's questionable whether Jose Mourinho's ultradefensive strategy was genius. Ultimately, it's impossible to ignore Gerrard's mistake for Demba Ba's opener, which will, somewhat cruelly, become one of the Premier League's most replayed moments. This mistake has widely been termed a slip, but it's actually a little more than that. The slip was only the second part of the error.
The first was Gerrard letting the ball roll under his foot, failing to trap the ball as he'd intended. The reason for that unsuccessful trap, the most basic piece of football control, is that he was already looking upfield, ready to launch a long diagonal pass.
Unfortunately, at that point he was also acting as Liverpool's primary defender, and it was somehow symbolic of Liverpool's downfall that Gerrard was caught napping defensively while trying to attack. The slip itself was unfortunate, perhaps the result of simple panic. The fact Gerrard had celebrated the victory over City by huddling his teammates together and warning them "this doesn't slip" was an irony not lost upon rival supporters.
The killer was Liverpool's 3-3 draw at Crystal Palace the following Monday night. The effect of this game has been both overstated and understated by various parties. On one hand, yes, even had Liverpool won that match, they still wouldn't have won the title, because Manchester City had a superior goal difference.
However, at that stage Manchester City still had two matches to go, and while they were both winnable home games, City had a deserved reputation for bottling it spectacularly against weaker sides, to the extent that even their dramatic title victory two years before, against a relegation-threatened QPR, was essentially a ludicrous escape from a position they'd never been on. A Liverpool win would have piled on the pressure.
Liverpool probably drew that Crystal Palace match, having been 3-0 up, because they were trying to make up goal difference on Manchester City. Although the deficit was considerable, Liverpool were scoring goals at a rate the Premier League had rarely seen before, and their final day opponents, Newcastle, were regularly losing 3-0 and 4-0 against teams with little to play for. It wasn't inconceivable that Liverpool could run up a record score line on the final day, and against Palace they went for more goals. They ended up conceding three, and again, this served as a metaphor for their failure.
Gerrard had one consolation. Rather than spending the summer ruing his mistake, he was off to captain his country at the World Cup. This represented a huge opportunity: the international retirement of John Terry meant Gerrard was the side's undisputed leader, while he'd also emerged ahead of Frank Lampard in the decade-long debate about the two. This was Gerrard's time to shine.
His role was different. Having experimented with Gerrard in his new role, Roy Hodgson instead paired him with Henderson in a two-man midfield. While frequently cast as a defensive-minded manager, largely because of his unhappy spell at Liverpool, Hodgson's actual crime in Brazil was being too adventurous. The stunning form of Raheem Sterling meant Hodgson ended up playing four attackers, and England were too open, which helped to expose Gerrard.
Gerrard was underwhelming in the 2-1 defeat against Italy, then truly awful in the 2-1 defeat to Uruguay. Oscar Tabarez gave Edinson Cavani a man-marking brief, a role he played magnificently, following Gerrard across the pitch and completely nullifying England's midfield creativity. If Gerrard wasn't playing long passes, he wasn't doing much. Defensively, he'd struggled in the Premier League and was found wanting at the World Cup, and made mistakes for both goals. He lost a tackle against Nicolas Lodeiro for the first goal, then accidentally nodded on a long clearance for the second. Both goals were scored by Suarez. AS, the Spanish newspaper, considered Gerrard so bad that it refused to award him a mark out of 10.
Gerrard struggling against the man-marking was so obvious, that by the time he returned to Premier League action for Liverpool for 2014-15, his card was marked.
In the early-season defeat to Manchester City, he was pressured by Stevan Jovetic, who also scored two goals. Others followed: Gabriel Agbonlahor, Stewart Downing and Moussa Sissoko all performed man-marking jobs for Aston Villa, West Ham and Newcastle respectively in victories over Gerrard's Liverpool.
The previous season, the situation was clear: Gerrard was a benefit when Liverpool had possession, but a liability without the ball. Now, the man-marking negated any benefit and Liverpool were now simply carrying a player. Meanwhile, supporters of almost every Premier League club sang about Gerrard's slip.
The sad thing about Gerrard's exclusion from Liverpool's trip to play in the Bernabeu is that, by that point, he probably wasn't in Liverpool's best XI anyway. That doesn't necessarily excuse Rodgers' defeatist team selection, but the reason to include Gerrard was now solely about sentiment -- a veteran player wanting to play on a big stage.
And, when you've reached that point, when there's a strong call for the manager to actually weaken his XI for a big match simply to include a club legend for the sake of it, you're past the point of no return. Liverpool and Gerrard were done.
With Gerrard struggling in the deeper role, Rodgers experimented by playing him in a more advanced position again. He performed well higher up the pitch, with Lucas behind, in a 3-1 win at Leicester. From there, he scored his only goal from open play in 2014, but the reaction was startling -- the focus was on Gerrard, not the team. The BBC's match report was literally interrupted by a feature asking whether Gerrard was "back to his best," which was plainly ludicrous when you consider quite how good he'd been between 2004 and 2009.
The final nail in the coffin, fittingly, came in Liverpool's final game of 2014. This was the only match that year, in Premier League, FA Cup, Champions League and World Cup, in which Gerrard didn't play a single minute. While he sat on the bench for the duration, Liverpool played their best football all season in a 4-1 thrashing of Swansea. Everything worked: Lallana and Coutinho drifted inside dangerously, Lucas held in midfield while Henderson, with the captain's armband, galloped forward. It was now official. Liverpool were better without Gerrard.
On the second day of 2015, Gerrard announced the inevitable: he was leaving Liverpool, to start a new adventure with LA Galaxy. The agreement had probably been in place for a while, but the timing couldn't have been more apt.
In the space of 12 months, Gerrard found a new position, epitomised the most unlikely title challenge for years, scored crucial goals from the penalty spot to make himself a hero, committed the error widely considered to have cost Liverpool the title, took England into a World Cup as captain, was England's weakest player as they were the first side eliminated, returned home to find everyone had sussed out his weakness, found himself out of the Liverpool team and eventually felt compelled to leave the club he'd been with since the age of 9.
That, more than anything else imaginable, is a make-or-break year.
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