Gerrard: I don't think I'll ever be at peace

With his wife, Alex, and their three school-age daughters at home in Liverpool, he is left for weeks at a time to find his level here in Los Angeles, a place once described by Jack Kerouac as the loneliest and most brutal American metropolis.

True, there is no language barrier, while the sun that shimmers off the asphalt in the mornings almost mandates a Beach Boys soundtrack. But it can still be a vast and alienating jungle for the uninitiated. Pick the wrong time of day to head south through the gridlock of the 405 freeway and one soon sees why LA is often caricatured, in the waspish words of poet Dorothy Parker, as 72 suburbs in search of a city.

Gerrard and his family have made their home in the ritziest neighbourhood of all, renting a six-bedroom Beverly Hills house once owned by Mariah Carey. But do not suppose for a second that he is in thrall to LA’s sheen of plastic-fantastic glamour.

“Yes, I’ve been shopping on Rodeo Drive, but I have also been down to the Farmers Market,” he says. “I’m not a materialistic person at all. I don’t go chasing celebrities. I’m not on the Hollywood bus, driving around to look at other people’s houses. I’m a home boy.

We meet in Carson, a part of town far removed from Cartier boutiques or the Avenue of the Stars. Once rolling ranchland, it has turned more recently into a vista of shopping malls and giant warehouses typical of the southern LA Basin. Even here, there is no avoiding the odd brush with superstardom. Earlier this week, Gerrard enjoyed a kickabout with Niall Horan of One Direction. Such are the perks, it seems, of being the marquee name at the Los Angeles Galaxy, Carson’s citadel of football and the centre of Gerrard’s universe for the next eight months at least.

In LA terms, Gerrard is firmly on the sporting undercard, a footnote in a city-wide circus centred upon the imminent retirement of Lakers legend Kobe Bryant. But he is content, at the age of 35 and with his own final season to contemplate, to keep it that way.

After half a lifetime of being mobbed on Merseyside, he relishes his relative anonymity. “The best part has been the ability to go incognito. Not many people know who I am out here. Soccer is No 5, No 6 in the order of important sports in this country. There are many bigger stars out here than us Premier League footballers. Here, I can leave the house, go for a coffee, go for a meal, go to the cinema and be left alone to enjoy a certain level of privacy. It has been refreshing.”

Even as he passes into a more serene and reflective phase of his career, football retains its capacity to consume him. When the Galaxy were due to travel to Mexico last month for a Concacaf quarter-final at Santos Laguna, coach Bruce Arena had to delay the flight by an hour so that Gerrard could watch Liverpool’s Capital One Cup final against Manchester City. “He wanted to watch it himself!” Gerrard protests. “I don’t want it to look like I’m getting extra privileges.”

At home, Gerrard avidly follows Premier League matches on television, albeit with some gridiron and basketball thrown in as he adjusts to the more congested sports landscape. As we speak in a pitch-level room at the StubHub Centre, the Galaxy’s stadium, many of his team-mates – Robbie Keane and Ashley Cole among them – are next door watching Chelsea lose to Paris St Germain.

One might imagine, given Major League Soccer’s long-held image as a retirement village for the greatest names, that Gerrard would be ready to temper his obsessiveness, that he would feel at peace with his vast body of work in football. The précis of his accomplishments – one Champions League triumph, 114 England caps, 36 of them as captain – ought surely to appease him. Only Gerrard, a naturally earnest soul, is not tempted by easy conclusions.

“You look back at the highs and the lows,” he explains. “I always recognise that I achieved some incredible things. But I also reflect on some of the lows and wish that they were different, that I had achieved a little more. I don’t think I’ll ever be at peace. When it comes to football, I’m quite hungry, quite selfish. I want more than perhaps I can have. Maybe I’m a bit like a kid, a bit immature, when it comes down to that. I wish I was sitting here with an extra 10 medals.”

He pulls himself up, lest he is perceived as dissatisfied with his lot in life. “I’m just a kid, a fan from a council estate in Huyton who had a dream of playing for Liverpool once. So, I haven’t done too badly.”

There is a perpetual restlessness about Gerrard, a resolve that his spell at the Galaxy should not be remembered just as a sinecure in the southern California sunshine. He joined the team in midstream last season, and the memory of how their campaign folded in grisly fashion, with a fifth-place finish in the Western Conference, still rankles.

“We got a bit flaky, conceded some stupid goals,” he mutters.

The subsequent decision to sign defensive reinforcements such as Cole, Nigel de Jong, the former Manchester City enforcer, and Belgian international Jelle van Damme should, he hopes, restore the pedigree of a franchise that won three MLS titles in four years from 2011. “When those players settle in, we’re going to have a hell of a team.”

A perception that MLS is a half-baked, half-paced imitation of the major European leagues – even Cole called it an “easy ride” before he moved here a year later – frustrates Gerrard. He claims that he has had to confront physical challenges unthinkable in the Premier League, with away days that range from the furnace-like heat of Texas in July to the rarefied air of the Rockies.

This weekend, the Galaxy play the Colorado Rapids in Denver, 5,000 feet above sea level, and already Gerrard blanches at the recollection of his first experiences at altitude. One lung-shredding run in Salt Lake City last year was quite enough to make him feel his age.

“It is a shock to the system,” he explains. “In the warm-up, you can’t breathe, you get this barbed-wire feeling in your throat. After half an hour you hit a brick wall and it takes maybe five, 10 seconds to find your second wind. When you get to 60 minutes, you feel as if you have played 120. People don’t register how difficult it is. If you tell them you’re heading to Houston, that they just assume that you are off to play football with the sun on your back. They don’t appreciate that it’s so humid, there’s essentially no air. Plus, you are playing against 11 men who are used to these conditions every single day. It is the challenge that we, as Galaxy players, have to face. The owners have put a pretty decent team together, and everybody is desperate to beat us.”  

The one missing link, of course, is history. Where Gerrard’s 25 years at Liverpool, from joining the academy at the age of nine, were defined by a tumultuous if ultimately ill-fated campaign for a first league title to make his CV complete, the Galaxy are more a blank canvas. For all the energy of LA’s home support, the atmosphere is hardly comparable to the crackling electricity of midweek European nights at Anfield. There is, likewise, no intra-city rivalry to stand alongside the enmities with Everton – even if, as he puts it wryly, the Californian derby with the San Jose Earthquakes, 300 miles to the north, can be “pretty tasty”.

Gerrard is at pains to stress that, while he is eight time zones away, barely a day goes by when he does not think of Liverpool. He communicates regularly with several players, and with manager Jürgen Klopp. “I text him quite a lot, but it’s more to wish him good luck than anything else,” he says. “I’m a huge Liverpool fan, and I will be until the day I die. I’ll give my commitment to the Galaxy but I’ll never, ever forget about Liverpool.”

What he misses most, though, is the round-the-clock presence of those closest to him. An avowed homebird, he is living abroad for the first time and feels the strain of separation acutely.

“I miss my mum, I miss my dad, I miss my family. I miss having all my friends around me. I even miss the cold sometimes.”

And yet Gerrard is sufficiently worldly to recognise how this is also an opportunity that might not come again.

His daughters’ teachers have shown understanding, allowing them extra time off in summer for holidays on the West Coast, while Gerrard seldom misses a chance to drive up beyond Santa Monica to Malibu on a spare afternoon, along the “spectacular” Pacific Coast Highway. “It’s good for my girls to come away from Liverpool and do some travelling. There’s a lot to tick off the bucket list.”

He tries not to agonise about the future too much. Gerrard intends, should he follow through on his plan to retire at the end of the season, to return to the UK, devoting time both to his punditry work and to his abiding aspiration to coach.

He merely wishes, he admits ruefully, that he had embarked on the coaching project a little earlier.

“I’m plugging away on my ‘A’ licence, but I wish I had been able to start sooner,” he says. “I wanted to be doing my Pro Licence by now. Instead, I left it until I was 33. There is hardly any time, when you are captain of Liverpool and captain of England, to worry about coaching. I would just like to have had the qualifications in the bag. There’s a lot of hard work to do.”

A theory persists that the West Coast lifestyle exerts a calming effect if you stay here long enough. Would Gerrard, adapting to an expatriate existence framed by a million palm trees, consider himself a more tranquil character now?

“You’d have to ask other people,” he says, smiling. “It can be a very calming place. My life until I came here was virtually set in stone. You didn’t have to be with me to know what I was doing: train at Melwood, home, pick the kids up from school, bit of tea, help with the homework, watch a movie, go to bed. That was 90 per cent of my life, whereas today, if I want to go for a hike, I can. If I’d like to take in an ice hockey match, I can. The climate creates far more variety. It puts you in a good mood.”

Just do not expect him to go all Hollywood on us. This is a city where new arrivals tend to converge in pursuit of a fleeting fame, but for Gerrard, the worship of status for its own sake holds not the slightest appeal.

“I respect everyone in their fields, but I just go about my life,” he says. “I’m not someone who’ll go looking for selfies with the stars.” Home, as ever, is where his heart resides.

Source: Telegraph

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