I’ve been pretty busy this week, but it would be a sad thing if I did not comment on Rickie’s retirement, especially in light of his recent BBC interview.
I knew nothing about Rickie when we signed him, save that he was a massive statement of intent from the club. He’d scored goals for fun in the preceding season and there weren’t any other League One clubs laying down a cool mil on a star striker. I soon learned that he was a scouser, and had links in both Kirkby and Fazakerly. I always like having successful scousers at Southampton. It provides an instant rebuke to any of the quasi-racist knuckle draggers that said all scousers were this, or all scousers were that.
“Oh aye, how about Rickie?”, I’d say, and they’d be silenced, because like me, they knew how much this Liverpolitan had contributed to our rise through the leagues. During a period of injury, I remember listening to a Saints podcast in which one of the presenters talked about his absence. “Rickie is basically our front”, he said. And he was. Get a ball to the man, and not only would it normally stick to him, but he’d usually have something sensible to do with it. It was entirely fitting that both of our star number sevens never had a game based around pace. In the case of the venerable Matt Le Tissier, we got to see that man play his whole career at our club. We got Rickie late. His 30th birthday celebrations were probably already a twinkle in his eye when we signed him. He was no spring chicken.
What we did get to see was remarkable. Lallana and Schneiderlin rose through the leagues with Rickie and stayed until transferred, but they were always seen as potential Premier League players. Rickie never was, and got there anyway. That’s not a small feat. Lee Barnard was quickly discarded, Guly do Prado went his way, as did a horde of other players in other positions. It’s easy to forget that Rickie rose to every level he arrived at, largely because his legend seems carved in stone in the mind of the Saints fan.
I think that even Rickie would agree that football-wise, his move to Liverpool was probably the worst move of his life, even though it ticked a childhood dream box and landed him a lucrative contract. That comes through in his retirement statement, if you read between the lines. His problem was that Rodgers never knew how good he was, or what he could do, instead preferring to bung him on late in the game as a big lump. He never got the space to develop at Liverpool, and his career never got over it.
I don’t know if he’d still be playing for us today. I suspect not, but his game was never about pace, and some of his attributes have been hard to replace, penalty taking and free kicks for starters. There’s a big part of me that regrets he’s not coming through the tunnel, Maldini style, ready to dispense a bit of football genius at his own damn pace.
Happy retirement, Rickie. We were privileged to witness your journey.