As far as technical ability goes for a midfielder he was fairly limited, but as a captain and leader of men and someone who set the standards of hard work and determination you wouldn’t find many better. He had the odd Hollywood pass in his locker too but it took me a while to realise that the reason he wasn’t playing them was because that’s not what Klopp wanted from his midfielders. He was basically a mini Klopp on the pitch and for all the stars we had the team suffered whenever he was unavailable which speaks volumes. There’s no point having a team full of stars without someone like Hendo to keep them all in line.
I do feel people miss the point about players like Hendo. Clearly he wasn’t Zidane or Gerrard, we all watched him play for years and understand his limitations. In any organisation (talking away from football for a second) you need people with a range of different skills to make the thing work. If you run a company that produces products let’s say - You might need people who are good with IT skills to keep things online, people with a more mechanical mindset so when shit breaks they can get it up and running quickly, you need people who can design and innovate, you need people who are happy stood in a warehouse putting stuff in boxes 9 hours a day to ship out to customers. If everyone in the organisation was a genius IT geek then the business is gonna fail pretty quickly.
Hendo was selected to be captain after the great man left and was played regularly in our midfield during the most successful period for our club in the last 35 years. He regularly covered the full back positions when they were bombing on and did lots of dirty work for the team, enabling those better footballers around him to fuck off towards the other goal when they could and win matches for us knowing that him/Milner etc had them covered. I agree he wasn’t/isn’t a brilliant footballer, nobody claims he is - but I doubt we would have won the trophies we did without him (and others too for various reasons - I’m not claiming he’s the sole reason). Many players have said what a great leader he was on and off the field - something that we as fans probably don’t appreciate. The positive winning culture that Jurgen cultivated at this club was promoted and probably at times enforced by Hendo (and others). He will always have my respect and will go down in history as one of the clubs most successful captains, despite not being a world class player like some captains who came before.
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You have described the situation perfectly.
As a great manager once said, “A football team is like a piano. You need eight men to carry it and three who can play the damn thing.”
Jordan was one of those guys that helped to carry the damn thing, letting those more gifted to get a tune out of it.
He wasn’t highly regarded by some when he first arrived, but he showed immense character to achieve what he did for us.
If you were in the trenches waiting for the signal whistle to climb over the top… one would hope they had a Jordan Henderson type personality next to them… Really difficult to put a price or value on having that type of grit and determination alongside in a battle
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Unless the opposing side offered him a decent wage to fight for them instead, he’d sell you out in a heartbeat.
HaHa… yeah maybe… but not sure he would
Or we can say that an element of luck is absolutely everywhere, but Hendo bloody worked hard to earn it and not only that - he was always good enough, it only came into question once (Rodgers did question it, but people make mistakes). And you don’t have to be Gerrard or Zidane to be that.
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being honest, I think we miss Milly just as much as we miss Henderson… Milner was a fucking beast out there.
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Totally agree, but I think milly was the leader off the pitch and would have set the standards of what is required
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