(Video) ‘I was miles off it’: Ex-Red on ‘pressure’ of living up to Liverpool colleague

Liverpool have played host to some of the best players in world football over the years and as much as that’s great for fans, it can lead to added pressure.

Speaking on ‘The Football Historian Podcast’, John Welsh described the feeling of being labelled: ‘the next Steven Gerrard’: “The pressure, I don’t remember feeling really pressured playing, it was just a natural pressure of: ‘I want to do well, I want to try and stay in the team.’

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“Them type of things were the main things that I got. When I come up, it was like: ‘the next Steven Gerrard’ and I was miles off that, I knew it myself.

“He was head and shoulders above anyone in England, never mind a young kid coming through, as much as I knew about it and read about it and people would ask me about it but I knew he was in a different level to what I would ever be.

“If I was half the player he was, I’d have had a lot of better career!”

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It’s a refreshingly honest assessment from the Scouser, who clearly understood that Steven Gerrard is far from a fair benchmark for any young player to be judged against.

For any boyhood Red to go on and play for the first team and be part of a squad that won a Champions League trophy, it’s safe to say that many would swap places to be half the player the former Preston captain was, too.

You can watch Welsh’s comments on Gerrard at Liverpool (from 7:41) via The Football Historian Podcast on YouTube:

EOTK Close-up with John Welsh: ‘a local lad who lived his dream’ and Slot’s LFC predictions

The post (Video) ‘I was miles off it’: Ex-Red on ‘pressure’ of living up to Liverpool colleague appeared first on The Empire of The Kop.