His legs have gone: The four words no footballer wants to hear
“I think Casemiro’s legs have gone,” Jamie Carragher told the Covering Liverpool podcast in October. “I noticed it last season at Anfield and I didn’t like what I saw. It took me back to watching Fabinho last year for Liverpool. I want to be the first to say it (about Casemiro). I don’t want to say it when everyone else is saying his legs have gone.”
What is clear is that the spotlight can be unforgiving for older players and, at times, unfair.
Gareth McAuley, who was still playing centre-back in the Premier League at the age of 37, viewed the “legs have gone” comment as an “easy shot” when it was directed at him at West Bromwich Albion, especially given how hard he was working to keep in shape and that it was not backed up by the data he was privy to at his club. “I was thinking, ‘I’m doing more than people who are 10 years younger’,” the 80-cap Northern Ireland international McAuley tells The Athletic. “You think, ‘Do you know what? Show some respect’. But it’s getting even younger now: boys at 28 and 29 are being described as ‘done’.”
Not every player has reason to feel hard done by in this situation — in some cases, they are in denial. Some are honest enough to hold their hands up and accept that time has caught up with them – a reality that can creep up on players during a season or, in the case of Gary Neville, be revealed in one brutal moment.
At West Brom on New Year’s Day in 2011, a 35-year-old Neville made his first start for Manchester United in two months. He describes in his autobiography how he
