Years ago I saw a cartoon in a magazine. Two women looked out of the lounge window, watching the husband of one of them walking up the drive with a thunderous face, bent golf clubs sticking out of his golf bag. "Another moral victory then," mocked the wife.
This is an idea that sports fans seem to understand without any apparent need for explanation - the moral victory, the idea that even though a team or a player lost a match, they should have won it, they deserved to win it, as if there were some unspoken but universally accepted criteria for judging victories outside the number of goals scored.
As the Premier League season reaches its climax, the D-word is rearing its ugly head again. Steven Gerrard, apparently, Deserves to win the PL. This Truth has been doing the rounds on forums, blogs and live text comments for weeks now, but not one single person has ever managed or even attempted to justify it. Winning is simple - you score more goals than the other team, you get three points and the proportionate increase in your goal difference. How do you Deserve to win something, and how does that convert into a material gain in the league table?
What are the criteria for insisting that if anyone Deserves a PL title it's Gerrard? Longevity? That's Emile Heskey in then. Or Tony Ford. Loyalty? That's John Trollope perhaps. Or Bert Trautmann. Or Ryan Giggs.
You think that list of names is taking the mickey? The point is that one player doesn't make a trophy, only a team. It's never about one player, any more than a PL trophy is about one game or one refereeing decision. If Gerrard doesn't have a PL trophy, it's because Liverpool have never done enough to win it. If that changes this season - and I've nothing against that - then they will have Deserved it based on the only criteria that matter - scoring goals, accumulating points.
As much as I will teach my kids about taking part and being sporting and fair play, the truth is that the PL is a billion-pound, alpha male, dog-eat-dog place to be, and within that context moral victories and the D-word are pathetic excuses for teams who lost. Only one team can win; nineteen will lose. Accept it.
The final word on Gerrard. Compare the years he's been the centre of Liverpool's team and then the more or less equivalent number of years before he started, say back to 1982, or 1980, or 1978. Seems to me like the decline started with Gerrard starting. Seems to me they should have chosen someone better as the basis for 16 years of teams. Seems to me if anyone Deserves to be sold on it's Steven Gerrard. And that's the thing about the D-word - it can work both ways too. So let's just stick to the usual criteria, yes?
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