James Lawton: Gerrard's marauding menace supplies note of authenticity in season of illusions

Gerrard was extraordinary in a Cup final some thought the greatest ever

It couldn't conjure a legitimate Premiership race, though at times it did dig beneath the beautiful, narcissistic skin of Jose Mourinho, and that was something. It struck down Wayne Rooney, turned the astonishing evolution of a great young player into a lottery of healing. It refused a final gift of glory to Arsenal as they prepared to start a new life away from those old majestic marble halls. It reserved maximum cruelty in denying full reward to the renascent London clubs Spurs and West Ham, first with a virus, then a human avalanche identified as Steven Gerrard.

But then if English football botched the appointment of Sven Goran Eriksson's successor, if it turned the whole process into a calamity of blurred priorities, if it did nothing to check the epidemic of cheating on the field, it could have been so much worse. It could have been Italian football; it could have been something beautiful gone bad, utterly. In English football, for all its failure to properly explore the bung culture, at least fans still believed that the game was both curable and worth the trouble.

That was something important to hold against uncertainties which were nowhere more pronounced than in World Cup preparation, where the disaster of Rooney's injury and the struggles of Michael Owen - two of the cornerstones of what we have chosen to describe as the "great generation" - was compounded for many hard pros by Eriksson's stunning decision to pick a 17-year-old he had never seen play and who still awaited his first call to top-flight action.

Yet amid those devastating attacks on optimism there was still indeed some reason to hope that Eriksson, even though some suspected that his impending departure from office had created a mood that was indistinguishable from irresponsibility, might just turn up something to confound his most seething critics.

Something like the phenomenal growth of Gerrard, who in this corner, and despite long-held reservations about a lack of consistent purpose in the classic challenge of shaping big games from midfield, has to be acknowledged as the player of the season.

The pros, who - like the football writers - have made some bizarre choices for their award in the past - let's talk our way through David Ginola, if we can - undoubtedly got it right as the season reached its climax. The pros said Gerrard, noting the force of his work for a Liverpool who made such major strides in solidifying their return to the élite of English football.

The writers, in the thrall of Thierry Henry's style and beguiled by the prospect of his conqueror's return to his native Paris, gave Henry the prize for an unprecedented third time. You could hardly protest the choice for fear of harassment by the style police, and pleasure at his decision to stay in London is surely not restricted to Arsenal's following. Henry will always be a glory of the game, but he didn't finish as strongly as Gerrard. He didn't rise up like some primitive force of nature. He didn't put in a single performance to match Gerrard's extraordinary statement in a Cup final that some thought the greatest ever played.

There is some loose talk about Gerrard filling the vacuum up front that is threatened by the injuries of Rooney and Owen, Peter Crouch's slender international experience and, perhaps, dwindling performance towards the end of the season, and the suspicion that even in pre-World Cup friendlies the scale of Eriksson's gamble on the untried Theo Walcott will become painfully obvious.

Such Gerrard speculation should be dismissed out of hand. Gerrard is no more a striker than he is an orthodox midfielder. He is a marauder who needs to have the ball in front of him. He needs to run into optimum positions with withering strength. No doubt his club manager, Rafael Benitez, has shown clearly the value of giving Gerrard some notionally specific duties; not for him to be put in chains but as a point of focus. Gerrard has proved this season beyond any doubt that with proper handling he can grow more dramatically, more explosively than any player in the land. This is a view which does not intrude on the status of the greatest home-grown talent, Rooney.

Rooney, we shouldn't be shy about saying this, has something Gerrard's warmest admirers wouldn't claim. Rooney has genius. The calendar says that he is 20 years old. In football terms he has gone far beyond such measurement. He is instinctive in a gloriously consistent fashion, and the weight he has taken on his shoulders in the difficulties, even agonies, of Manchester United's transition have been quite staggering.

So why isn't he player of the year? Because here we have to give Gerrard his marks for that growth which has, for one thing, made ridiculous the suggestions in so many quarters, including this one, that there was a point when Gerrard's promises had to be set against seriously erratic performances. Eriksson has been charged, legitimately, with a failure to resolve the issue of why Gerrard and Frank Lampard, two hugely rated talents in the world market, have not been able to show the best of themselves in the England team. A solution has been demanded, but we know now it cannot have as any part of it Gerrard's exclusion from the national team. Gerrard has insisted on this with his astonishing strike rate and vastly expanded influence for Liverpool.

The difficulty in any award system is that you can hardly give Rooney the prize of Young Player of the Year. It would be a bit like electing Pitt the Younger to the local council. Rooney is beyond boundaries of age and he proved that when made his first competitive start for England three years ago.

So who is the choice here for Young Player of the season? It has to be Cesc Fabregas. He didn't finish strongly. The Champions' League campaign he so brilliantly invigorated against Juventus prepared an ambush or two. He was outnumbered and at times outplayed in Paris in the sadly distorted final. He was handed a man's job, arguably the toughest in world football. He had to contend against the creative force of the world's best player, Ronaldinho, and the driving energy of Deco.

At 18 it was a job of pitiless challenge and the fear had to be that it would break him. Those who know him best, however - and they include the great midfielder and Highbury development chief, Liam Brady - insist that this is a man-child not for breaking. Brady says: "There are not many certainties in football but Cesc is one of them. He knows the game and he has everything you need in a midfielder."

It was a season which deepened some other reputations, and not least Gerrard's Anfield team-mate Jamie Carragher. The Liverpool zealot was long ago voted England's best defender, technically, by the World Cup-winner George Cohen, and if the sight of his own goal in the Cup final, was shocking, it did nothing to shift the instinct that he should form England's central defence with John Terry in the World Cup. Rio Ferdinand is, no doubt, sumptuous on the ball but does he defend with anything like the resilience and consistency of Carragher? The record says not.

Manager/coach of the season? Mourinho? When you have his resources, when you are about to augment the strongest, deepest squad in English football with such as Ballack and Shevchenko winning the Premiership becomes, surely, more than anything a badge of competence. Nor did it help that for a second straight year he was outwitted in the Champions' League.

Benitez? He is assembling a formidable body of work, with relatively limited resources, but in many ways it was his season of entrenchment. Sir Alex Ferguson at least held his position as the heavyweight who might just come back. Arsène Wenger resurrected some of the best of his work, and there were times when he thrilled the football nation, but in the end he carried more promise than fulfilment.

So upon whom do we bestow the title? We split it, award it jointly to West Ham's Alan Pardew and Wigan's Paul Jewell. Both led their teams to major finals. Both inflicted a bold view of the game. They said there was more to be won than mere survival even if you were outside the big league. They were tough and they were visionary. They were also, astoundingly, English.