James Lawton: In the age of the celebrity footballer, Gerrard cannot play the everyman

So what does Gerrard do? Live like a hermit or take his chances wherever he goes?

(GETTY IMAGES)

Someone within football might eventually get round to saying that whatever the findings of the court Steven Gerrard was displaying rather less than ultimate professional judgement by hanging around the bar of a nightclub until the early hours of last Monday morning.

By doing so they will provoke all kinds of wrath and indignation, plus certain reiteration of the barking theory popular in parts of Merseyside that, rather than being at least to some degree the author of his own problems, the Liverpool captain was, somehow, the victim of a conspiracy to deny his club its best chance of winning the title in 20 years.

Of course, he is not, a victim that is, at least not any more so than all the other grown-ups who have been obliged to observe that today's world is rather more hazardous than the one they inhabited not so long ago and reluctantly accept they have to act according to that reality.

This is why it is probably not a good idea to suggest to a couple of teenagers who have their feet sprawled across the seats of an underground train that they really should improve their deportment. There is a chance, of course, that they might stand to be corrected, but then it is also possible the concern for the upholstery will be rewarded by a knife in the ribs.

For Gerrard the football hero, there is also the additional pressure of being a magnet for attention whatever you do wherever you go, most of it benevolent if at times oppressive but, given the age we live in, inevitably in some cases malevolent or jealous or a combination of both. So what do you do? Live like a hermit in your mansion; call catering when you want to dine and wine – or take your chances wherever, and at whatever time, you want to go?

Gerrard chose to take the second course and now everybody knows the consequences, and this is before any legal attempt to apportion blame.

What seems absurd, at least here, is the slowness of English football and some of its highest profile performers to understand that, however irksome it may be, there are demands and risks that simply cannot be set aside when the referee blows the final whistle.

That last concept belongs to another age, one that was dismantled around about the time a wrecking ball landed on the already somewhat battered edifice of the Maid of Erin – a pub in a maze of little streets off Liverpool's Scotland Road. With no disrespect to the Lounge Inn in Southport, where the Gerrard crisis unfolded, the Maid of Erin was a place where a football star could wear his celebrity as comfortably as a stringed-vest.

Ian St John and his friend and team-mate Ronnie Yeats went there in 1964 after Bill Shankly – who always insisted the footballers' Christmas came in mid-summer – led them to their first league title. It is poignant to hear, now, St John's recall of a vanished pub – and a vanished world.

Ironically, like Gerrard, St John had been part of a five-goal performance, a title clincher over Arsenal at Anfield, before going to the spit-and-sawdust pub, and in an account touched with prophecy he reported several years ago, he remembered, "Anfield had throbbed in the afternoon and in the Maid of Erin there was a tidal flow of Guinness. For a few hours Ronnie and I were breathing the joy of the fans. I had known that intimacy up in Scotland but not in such a moment of triumph and sometimes today I wonder how much easier it was back in those days to feel part of a city, to go out on to the field knowing precisely the weight and the dreams you carried on your shoulders when the referee blew the whistle to start a game.

"How easily do today's players associate with the fans as they make their carefully screened public appearances and peer at life from behind their dark glasses? In the Maid of Erin Ronnie and I felt the force that had shaped our contemporaries in the surrounding streets, professionals such as Tommy Smith and Gerry Byrne and Johnny Morrisey."

It is a lament that is, however, not entirely given over to any romanticising of the past. There were times when Shankly's concept of the professional life did not entirely coincide with that of his players and more than once St John was required to do his penance. Yesterday, he admitted to a degree of bewilderment when he considered the plight of the modern player.

"You can see how Steven Gerrard would want to get out of his house and unwind a bit after the pressure of recent games, and how he might also want to celebrate a little. It was all very well Shanks talking about Christmas in the summer, but he was in middle age then and he led a certain kind of life and having a few drinks really wasn't part of it. For him football was a god, and when you are young that's a position not so easy to take."

Certainly St John was not a stranger to the hazards of celebratory occasions. He recalled one party at the five-star Adelphi when a member of the underworld was thought to be in possession of a gun and not feeling terribly well disposed towards the hero of Anfield. "After walking into a lift I saw him standing out in the corridor and the doors closed very slowly. It was like something out of a movie."

But those were days, too, when you could take a little cover in the goldfish bowl. "Mostly, you were looked after pretty well... the city was a place where you felt comfortable, where generally you never had much sense that you were on your own. It was though there was always someone around who would look after your situation."

Indeed, another great Liverpool team, containing men like the formidable Graeme Souness, was known to have in the hours of relaxation the underpinning of a physically unprepossessing companion who was superbly trained in some of the fiercer martial arts.

Such layers of security are not so easily supplied in the culture of the celebrity footballer – and in the plush watering holes where violence so often never seems too far away.

Perhaps the great Ian Rush had something of a premonition of the future necessities of the footballer's life when he joined Juventus from Liverpool in the Eighties.

After his first match for Juve, he was astonished to receive blank looks when he asked to be directed to the players' bar.

There was no such place, he was told. Then he saw his team-mates do their television spots and brief media interviews, climb into their cars and drive off to their gated villas in the hills.

He saw it as the bleak future of what used to be an amiable life. For many, and perhaps not least Steven Gerrard, that future may now have arrived.

Pietersen needs a hand at a time when England lack leadership

However Kevin Pietersen resolves his power-play with the coach Peter Moores, the need for a strong hand on the tiller of English cricket has never been more apparent.

Pietersen's ultimatum on behalf of Michael Vaughan was plainly absurd, given the manner of the former captain's departure and his lack of opportunity to prove that he had rehabilitated both his batsmanship and his competitive nerve.

Much faith has been placed in Pietersen's potential to be as outstanding a leader as he is a talent. However, he, like Vaughan, still is some way short of the most convincing credentials and the latest evidence of his maturity and professionalism, not withstanding the promising showing in India, is somewhat less than overwhelming.

For many, England's team has resembled nothing so much as a comfortable club in which reputations have stretched far longer than the evidence of a finely honed competitive instinct.

In effect, Pietersen has stamped his feet and demanded the presence of a former playmate. It is not the way winning teams are run. The best formula is provided by strong leadership which carries a team beyond the comfort zone in which the England players have been allowed to operate for so long.

Surely, the time has arrived for such leadership, in the form of a manager-selector who faces the one classic judgement on which his performance can be assessed over, say, a three-year period. Until that point of responsibility is clearly established, England will remain subject to every gust of egotistical wind.