On the Saturday that Ireland played England in the Six Nations, a few of us stood in the Kop among the locals and other international football tourists to see how Liverpool’s goal-scoring carnival would perform against that afternoon’s visitors West Ham United.
Although this was late February, the city was sparkling: sunny and crisp and the local crowd buoyed by the undiluted entertainment guaranteed by Jürgen Klopp’s vision of Liverpool 2018.
The taxi driver who took us out to the ground had “grown up” with Stevie G, and was happy to give us the skinny how the former Anfield gods liked to spend their days.
In the Albert, one of the local shrines where we were due to collect the tickets, the line for the bar was five deep and the place reeked of beer, long-stubbed cigarettes and, overwhelmingly, Liverpool’s special brew of nostalgia.
The television sets high in the corners of the house ran highlights of the grand old days, replaying the 1977 final against Borussia game on loop and showed Emlyn Hughes practising the game smile he would later use as team captain on A Question of Sport.
It was a motley crew: locals, loads of Irish, couples, several groups of thrilled Asian supporters and a German biking gang. The predominant mood was one of local contentment; that it would be a good day. So it proved.
Liverpool’s form has been so expressive and euphoric all season that watching them that afternoon was like being on a safari with the expectation of catching sight of the big three: Mohammad Salah, Robert Firmino and Sadio Mane. All three duly obliged, finishing Kop-end goals that bore the hallmarks of Liverpool’s sublime attacking play all winter: exquisite first-touch football and apparent effortlessness in front of goal.
Absurdly simple
They made the game look at once magically light and absurdly simple. The unexpected thing was that over the 90 minutes your eyes were drawn away from the shimmering star power of Salah and company to another figure further out the field. It’s an entirely different thing watching football from the vantage point of behind the goal to watching a game on television or even the neutral, halfway line vantage points of a press box.
In Anfield that afternoon the 4-1 final score was slightly misleading as there were times in the first half when Liverpool defended the Kop goal that the back four looked alarmingly vulnerable as a unit, and twice when the visitors should have scored.
Time and time again Liverpool seemed to be one pass away from being completely unpicked, and time and time again it was James Milner who seemed to pop up to make the necessary tackle or intervention or be available as a get-out-of-jail receiver for a defender under pressure with the ball.
His industry was ceaseless, and over the course of the 90 minutes, with the contest transformed into a procession of goals, Milner became the most compelling figure on the field. If he wasn’t in motion or linking play or covering back, then he was picking himself up off the ground, shipping a series of heavy tackles after which he would just pick himself up uncomplainingly and get on with it.
If Milner is one of those players who seems to have been part of the chorus line of England’s football winters forever it’s because he has. He made his league debut in 2002 under Terry Venables in a Leeds United team that featured players who belong to an entirely different era of the English game; names like Harry Kewell and Nicky Barmby. David Batty, the combative midfielder who had been part of Kevin Keegan’s title-chasing Newcastle gang in 1997, was the senior midfielder at the club.
Physique
So Milner’s football career straddles those two Premier league eras – from Venebles to Klopp – and he himself seems like a throwback in style and physique to a disappeared type of footballer, with the sturdy, low centre of gravity gait, the maniacal work rate and the exceptional concentration on completing the 1,000 small, vital tasks required of every successful football team.
Once he has done his thing – won the ball, made the tackle, pushed Firmino or any of his wingers into a promising attacking position with a simple, deft pass – he is content to take a breather and watch the magic unfold.
Milner’s versatility has been his calling card and a curse. In his early days he went from playing on the left side of midfield to the right at Newcastle, where he played under Graeme Souness. Not long after arriving at the club, Souness remarked that he did not “see myself being here for a long time by buying a team of James Milners”.
He was citing Milner’s youth rather than his playing ability, promising to bring in the kind of seasoned professionals that, he hoped, could push the sleeping giants of the northeast into contention – the kind of presence that he himself had been when Liverpool were an indomitable presence in the English league.
He ended up signing Albert Luque and Jean-Alain Boumsong, while Milner, sent out on loan to Aston Villa, just continued to get on with it; learning his trade, improving and earning a move to Manchester City to coincide with the repositioning of that club as a global powerhouse of money and ambition.
So here he stands on Saturday evening after accepting in 2015 a £15,000 per week pay cut to move to Liverpool on a free transfer in a bid to get more regular playing time at a big club. Even since then he found himself shunted about by Klopp, moving from centre-field to left-back last season, a role he didn’t much cherish but carried out with competence and diligence, reasoning: “It’s not for James Milner, is it? It’s for Liverpool FC. That’s the way I was brought up. When I came through at Leeds they were the standards set by Batty, Matteo, Viduka and Smith. Great professionals.”
Physical courage
He is 32 years old, and has a solid 62 appearances for country to his name. He leads this year’s Champions League statistics in assists, and, strangely, it is by finding himself on a team characterised by illuminating football and breathtaking individualists that his qualities have come into sharper focus – the unselfishness, the willingness to bail a team-mate out, the physical courage, the intelligence and the experience.
And amid the parade of superstars on both sides in Kiev this evening, standing as an old-fashioned pro with the most sought after footballers in the world game, Milner’s game – the authority and mental toughness and his refusal to be impressed – could become the most precious commodity on the pitch as Liverpool’s thrilling season comes down to this nerve-wracking high-wire walk.
In short, Milner has become the player that Graeme Souness had sought all those years ago, only to discover that they are not that easily found.
