It was the first day of Jurgen Klopp’s last pre-season as Liverpool manager, and his players were charged with doing laps of pitches on their Kirkby training ground. At the end, Klopp, with a huge grin, said: “And the James Milner award goes to…” Mohamed Salah was the exhausted recipient but only, probably, by default, because Milner had left. He had won Liverpool’s lactate test every year he was at Anfield, even into his mid-thirties. Liverpool had shown the footage in 2019; Joe Gomez, 11 years Milner’s junior, was his last rival, but inexorably, the running machine dropped him, the defender falling ever further behind.
As Milner breaks Gareth Barry’s record of 653 Premier League appearances, it is because he has kept on running for longer than anyone else. Since 2002; he has played top-flight football for 24 seasons, at 16 and at 40 and every age in between. His first-team bow was closer to the 1970s than to today. When he debuted, he had sat on the Leeds bench along with Nigel Martyn, who was born in 1966. He has been a Brighton teammate of Harry Howell, born in 2008, after Milner had made 226 senior appearances. He has played for managers born in 1933 and 1993, in Bobby Robson and Fabian Hurzeler.
