Steven Gerrard has given a lengthy Q&A to the Liverpool Echo to mark their readers voting him Liverpool's greatest Premier League player. (Andrea Dossena narrowly missed out on a place in the top ten, before you ask). Many of the answers are unsurprising: Istanbul is his career highlight, while Jamie Carragher is his best mate and Luis Suarez and Fernando Torres were the best players he played alongside. (Andrea Dossena didn't get a mention, before you ask).
Gerrard was also asked about his favourite manager in his time at Anfield, and while the question was to be expected, the answer was somewhat surprising:
They were all different, so that's always a difficult question for me to answer.
You can have good times under certain people. They may not be your favourite person, it's just when you're at the peak in your career, so my answer to that is always Rafa.
He always wanted to mould me into a type of player who was more tactically aware and the way he set up the team was perfect for me. With the people he put in the team that were around me, I always felt at my best. You can also add in the fact I was coming up to being 24 or 25 so was going into my peak years.
Tactically, of course, Rafa was also world class.
To be honest, I enjoyed playing for all the managers. Kenny was one of my heroes, and I loved the football we played under Brendan Rodgers.
I had good times personally under Roy Hodgson, and I felt I played well under him and it was a shame in some ways I couldn't work more with him.
Plus, of course, there's a special mention to Gerard Houllier, who gave me my first start and helped me so much on and off the pitch in those early days.
Gerrard enjoyed his best years under Benitez, the manager who found Gerrard's best position: a No.10 role behind Fernando Torres. But his relationship with Benitez was famously cold. In his most recent autobiography, Gerrard wrote that there is "no bond between us":
Gerard introduced Rafa to my mum. Rafa shook her hand, said hello and then immediately asked her a very blunt question: ‘Does Steven like money?’
Apart from a standard ‘Hello... good to meet you’ introduction, those were the first words Rafa said to my mum. I thought: ‘What kind of question is that?’
I can pick up the phone and speak to all of my previous Liverpool managers. Except for Rafa. It’s a shame because we probably shared the biggest night of both our careers — the 2005 Champions League victory in Istanbul — and yet there is no bond between us.
I used to think he favoured our Spanish-speakers. He was an especially big fan of South American players, which is fine. It caused no problem between us.
At press conferences he might call other players by their first name but I was always ‘Gerrard’. It was the same in the dressing room. He would read out the team and use nicknames. But, for me, it would just be ‘Gerrard’.
Gerrard did go on to write that Benitez' frostiness drove him on to succeed even more, but did also come extremely close to leaving the club on two occasions when Benitez was in charge.
You can read the full interview on the Liverpool Echo's website.
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