Steven Gerrard puts mind over matter as the dream takes shape
Oliver Kay
Last updated at 12:01AM, April 26 2014
Oliver Kay explains how Liverpool captain has got chimp out of his thoughts in a bid to get the monkey off his back
In The Chimp Paradox, the self-help book that helped to turn Steven Gerrard’s career around, Dr Steve Peters urges you to connect with your “Dream Machine”.
“The Dream Machine”, as Peters puts it, is a seven-stage process that encourages you to set out a dream and to do everything possible to try to achieve it. Before you do that, though, you have to understand the difference between a dream and a goal. “A dream,” the psychiatrist writes, “is something you want to happen but is not fully under your control. It’s just a wish. Goals are something you can set and achieve because you have control of them. Goals increase the chances of dreams happening.”
On the day three years ago that Gerrard first went to see Peters, lifting the Barclays Premier League title as captain of Liverpool was barely a dream, never mind a goal. On his first visit, he was on crutches, exasperated by a career-threatening groin problem — “not knowing whether I had a future in the game”, he said recently, “a little bit lost” and “needing that little bit of help mentally to stick in there”.
We will never know the specifics of what Gerrard and Peters discussed in those sessions. We do not know whether he proposed winning the Premier League as a dream or a goal or whether Peters, scanning the league table, suggested that he might like to consider something a little more realistic.
It is a wonderful story that Gerrard, who had looked certain to join Sir Stanley Matthews, Sir Tom Finney, and Bobby Moore among the ranks of great English players not to win the league championship, should find himself in this situation with his home-town club at 33. In his book My Liverpool Story, published in late 2012, he said “it will be a miracle if I win the league with Liverpool”, but here he is closing in on the prize. Take seven points from their three remaining games, starting with that almighty tussle with Chelsea at Anfield tomorrow, and Liverpool will be crowned champions for the first time since he was nine years old.
It feels appropriate that Chelsea stand in his and Liverpool’s way. Chelsea, under José Mourinho, are the club he seemed destined to join in 2004, frustrated by a Liverpool downturn, and again in 2005, submitting a transfer request only weeks after what remains the stand-out moment of his career when he lifted the European Cup on that extraordinary night in Istanbul.
There was often a conflict in Gerrard’s mind between the emotional attachment to Liverpool and the ruthless ambition that every top-class sportsman possesses. Had he gone to Peters in the summers of 2004 or 2005 or indeed 2010, when there was strong interest from Mourinho at Real Madrid amid serious turmoil at Liverpool, the psychiatrist might feasibly have advised him that the emotional tug was that of his “chimp” and therefore to be distrusted when calm logic was needed.
Gerrard said in early 2009 that, while he envied Gary Neville, John Terry and others their Premier League winner’s medals, he longed to win the trophy for Liverpool. “That would mean more to me than winning it maybe five or six times somewhere else,” he said.
That was the season when Liverpool finished runners-up to Manchester United with 86 points under Rafael Benítez. From there it was a dramatic downward slump — seventh with 63 points in 2009-10, then sixth with 58 points, then eighth with 52 points. Champions League football had gone; the feel-good factor around Anfield had gone; challenging for titles had gone; Xabi Alonso and Fernando Torres had gone; three years ago, laid low for months by an adductor avulsion and an ankle infection, Gerrard thought his legs were going.
Team-mates and support staff at Liverpool recall a noticeable change in Gerrard — less angst-ridden, calmer in his focus — after he first visited Peters on the recommendation of one of the club’s physiotherapists. Mentally, physically, it all started to come together again.
There was still a problem when Brendan Rodgers took charge of Liverpool in the summer of 2012, though. They connected immediately, but there were philosophical differences. Rodgers preached the values of patience, of passing the opponents into submission, of “death by football”. It seemed at odds with Gerrard’s approach, which had always been about box-to-box dynamism and long, raking passes.
Not long into last season, they agreed that something had to change. Whether the system was 4-3-3, 4-2-3-1 or so fluid as almost to defy description, Gerrard would become the fixed point in central midfield, which would not only help him tactically but ease the physical burden on his ageing limbs.
It would require him to learn a new position, to try to control the game from in front of the back four and to stop runners getting behind him. It seemed a little late in his career to be trying to redefine Gerrard’s role, but, like just about everything Rodgers has done over the past 18 months or so, it has worked remarkably well.
As we enter the final weekend of April, what started as an impossible dream now looks like an attainable goal, but Peters would counsel against such talk: “If you carry out all the goals needed to give the dream the best chance of success, then you can be happy that you did your best.”
Somehow it is hard to imagine Gerrard settling for that, after the intensity of past weeks. “This does not slip,” he told his team-mates in that on-pitch rallying cry after the 3-2 win over Manchester City a fortnight ago. There was a time when the expectation, the pressure of carrying the club’s hopes on his shoulders, would have caused him sleepless nights. These days, far from a burden, it has become the driving force behind the dream machine.
Oliver Kay
Last updated at 12:01AM, April 26 2014
Oliver Kay explains how Liverpool captain has got chimp out of his thoughts in a bid to get the monkey off his back
In The Chimp Paradox, the self-help book that helped to turn Steven Gerrard’s career around, Dr Steve Peters urges you to connect with your “Dream Machine”.
“The Dream Machine”, as Peters puts it, is a seven-stage process that encourages you to set out a dream and to do everything possible to try to achieve it. Before you do that, though, you have to understand the difference between a dream and a goal. “A dream,” the psychiatrist writes, “is something you want to happen but is not fully under your control. It’s just a wish. Goals are something you can set and achieve because you have control of them. Goals increase the chances of dreams happening.”
On the day three years ago that Gerrard first went to see Peters, lifting the Barclays Premier League title as captain of Liverpool was barely a dream, never mind a goal. On his first visit, he was on crutches, exasperated by a career-threatening groin problem — “not knowing whether I had a future in the game”, he said recently, “a little bit lost” and “needing that little bit of help mentally to stick in there”.
We will never know the specifics of what Gerrard and Peters discussed in those sessions. We do not know whether he proposed winning the Premier League as a dream or a goal or whether Peters, scanning the league table, suggested that he might like to consider something a little more realistic.
It is a wonderful story that Gerrard, who had looked certain to join Sir Stanley Matthews, Sir Tom Finney, and Bobby Moore among the ranks of great English players not to win the league championship, should find himself in this situation with his home-town club at 33. In his book My Liverpool Story, published in late 2012, he said “it will be a miracle if I win the league with Liverpool”, but here he is closing in on the prize. Take seven points from their three remaining games, starting with that almighty tussle with Chelsea at Anfield tomorrow, and Liverpool will be crowned champions for the first time since he was nine years old.
It feels appropriate that Chelsea stand in his and Liverpool’s way. Chelsea, under José Mourinho, are the club he seemed destined to join in 2004, frustrated by a Liverpool downturn, and again in 2005, submitting a transfer request only weeks after what remains the stand-out moment of his career when he lifted the European Cup on that extraordinary night in Istanbul.
There was often a conflict in Gerrard’s mind between the emotional attachment to Liverpool and the ruthless ambition that every top-class sportsman possesses. Had he gone to Peters in the summers of 2004 or 2005 or indeed 2010, when there was strong interest from Mourinho at Real Madrid amid serious turmoil at Liverpool, the psychiatrist might feasibly have advised him that the emotional tug was that of his “chimp” and therefore to be distrusted when calm logic was needed.
Gerrard said in early 2009 that, while he envied Gary Neville, John Terry and others their Premier League winner’s medals, he longed to win the trophy for Liverpool. “That would mean more to me than winning it maybe five or six times somewhere else,” he said.
That was the season when Liverpool finished runners-up to Manchester United with 86 points under Rafael Benítez. From there it was a dramatic downward slump — seventh with 63 points in 2009-10, then sixth with 58 points, then eighth with 52 points. Champions League football had gone; the feel-good factor around Anfield had gone; challenging for titles had gone; Xabi Alonso and Fernando Torres had gone; three years ago, laid low for months by an adductor avulsion and an ankle infection, Gerrard thought his legs were going.
Team-mates and support staff at Liverpool recall a noticeable change in Gerrard — less angst-ridden, calmer in his focus — after he first visited Peters on the recommendation of one of the club’s physiotherapists. Mentally, physically, it all started to come together again.
There was still a problem when Brendan Rodgers took charge of Liverpool in the summer of 2012, though. They connected immediately, but there were philosophical differences. Rodgers preached the values of patience, of passing the opponents into submission, of “death by football”. It seemed at odds with Gerrard’s approach, which had always been about box-to-box dynamism and long, raking passes.
Not long into last season, they agreed that something had to change. Whether the system was 4-3-3, 4-2-3-1 or so fluid as almost to defy description, Gerrard would become the fixed point in central midfield, which would not only help him tactically but ease the physical burden on his ageing limbs.
It would require him to learn a new position, to try to control the game from in front of the back four and to stop runners getting behind him. It seemed a little late in his career to be trying to redefine Gerrard’s role, but, like just about everything Rodgers has done over the past 18 months or so, it has worked remarkably well.
As we enter the final weekend of April, what started as an impossible dream now looks like an attainable goal, but Peters would counsel against such talk: “If you carry out all the goals needed to give the dream the best chance of success, then you can be happy that you did your best.”
Somehow it is hard to imagine Gerrard settling for that, after the intensity of past weeks. “This does not slip,” he told his team-mates in that on-pitch rallying cry after the 3-2 win over Manchester City a fortnight ago. There was a time when the expectation, the pressure of carrying the club’s hopes on his shoulders, would have caused him sleepless nights. These days, far from a burden, it has become the driving force behind the dream machine.
