Carragher Calls It
A Day
On the 7th of February, 35 year old Liverpool defender Jamie
Carragher announced that he would be retiring from football at the end of the
current season after spending 16 years playing for the club. Carragher will be
missed greatly by all Liverpool fans given the amount of time and hard work he
has put in to try and make the club as successful as possible. The announcement
itself doesn’t come as too much of a surprise given his age and a slight
decline in his game time over the last couple of seasons, but at least with him
announcing it this month, it gives Brendan Rodgers more time to consider
possible replacements. While of course finding another centre half should be
relatively simple, finding someone who cared as much for the club as Carragher
will not be so easy. That is not to say whoever cares in won’t care for the
club, but more drawing attention to the fact that Carragher had chances in his
career to move to other clubs but instead decided to stay at Anfield and cement
himself as a club legend and a real fans favourite. The local man won several
honours during his time at the club including 3 League Cups, 2 Community
Shields, 2 FA Cups, 2 UEFA Super Cups and 1 UEFA Cup, but undoubtedly the
biggest honour was The Champions League in 2005 when Liverpool beat AC Milan
3-2 on penalties after the thrilling 3-3 encounter in Istanbul.
So this decision from Carragher then begs the question,
where does he go from here? England Manager Roy Hodgson believes he has what it
takes to become a top coach while his current boss Brendan Rodgers says he
still has a chance to be involved with Liverpool in a backroom role if he
wishes when he hangs up his boots in May. He still has plenty of time to make
his mind up of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he decided to stay at
Liverpool for a couple of seasons at least to get some experience working on
the coaching side of things before perhaps moving to another club in a more
advanced role. I’m not sure if I could see him becoming involved with a
position in the media as there are fewer opportunities these days to get the
right role, but if one came up in the near future and if took it up I’d be
willing to see what he had to offer in that job. So for the time being he has a few options to
consider before making his decision after the season reaches its climax. One
thing I think we can all agree on is that we won’t see Carragher quietly
leaving the football world in a couple months time. It is clear from every time
I saw him play for club and country that he loves the game too much to just
leave and live in peace and quiet for the rest of his life. So while we won’t
see him wearing his iconic Liverpool 23 shirt anymore, we’ve certainly not seen
the last of Jamie Carragher completely.
P.S. Apologies for this week’s post being really short. I
had hoped to have written a whole lot more but it has been a pretty hectic week
for me in many ways and I’ve not had much time to do anything else. I’ve also
not had a chance to see any of the FA Cup fixtures from this past weekend and
only got to see part of one match from the Champions League last week so I
would have tried to include these into my post but they wouldn’t have been
great quality since I didn’t see much or any of them. I’ll do my best to do a
much better post for next week and make sure this doesn’t become a habit. Thank
you for understanding.
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