The Ballad of Emile Heskey

The 19th of March, 2002. Liverpool face Roma in the last 16 of the Champions League needing to win by two clear goals to reach the quarter-finals. They go 1-0 up after six minutes and then in the 63rd, Danny Murphy whips a free kick into the box and there is Emile Heskey, rising like a great engine of war hoisted on the shoulders of willing warriors to thunder a header past goalkeeper Francesco Antonioli. For a player who won six medals in his Liverpool career, it was probably his finest individual moment.

This weekend, at the age of 37, Heskey returned to Liverpool, 15 years after he signed for the club. It seemed inconceivable that after all these years journalists would get the chance to write another round of "Is big Emile finally going to fulfill his potential?" articles. For a while, as his Liverpool career spluttered and died, that was the only thing we ever read about him.

Anfield sang his name before the game and then, when he was substituted in the 56th minute, rose to clap him off. He sat on Liverpool's back three, won some balls in the air and on the deck but with his side aiming to stifle Liverpool rather than open them up, Heskey never got a chance to canter off towards his fans, one hand on an imaginary headphone, the other spinning an imaginary record – a trademark goal celebration that was born in the summer of 2000 when Emile and some of his mates took a trip to Ayia Napa and, in the words of the BBC, "came back with their heads full of the island's favourite garage tunes". 2-step and hitting the back of the net have gone hand in hand for Heskey ever since.

He will get another chance to inflict wounds upon his old club in the replay that will follow the dour 0-0 draw but the homecoming felt particularly significant. The Kop who rose to applaud him and those who noted the emotional significance of his return provided a much-needed rebuttal to those who see Heskey as an internet joke, derided for being crap on FIFA, laughed at for all those "sweaty goals" he couldn't score or even for the fact that he was so good in Australia they invented "Heskeycam", a camera that followed Emile and Emile alone on his way through matches.

There's a video entitled "Emile Heskey The Worst Football Player Ever". Richard Bacon provides the commentary at the beginning and one of the recommended videos at the end is of a dog crapping on the pitch. That's all you need to know. Whenever the Nuts magazine banter merchants and the drive time 'ledges needed a whipping boy, Heskey was there.

The Leicester-born striker is a man who has borne the brunt of more slings and arrows than almost any other English player this century. He was blamed for the demise of Liverpool and England. He was called a lumbering beast that couldn't hit a barn door if he was standing right next to it and even while he was surrounded by the preening, self-regarding celebrities of Eriksson-era England he still somehow managed to be blamed for that team's inability to do anything other than get knocked out of a competition on penalties in the quarter-finals.

In his autobiography, Jamie Carragher has some interesting insights into playing with Heskey and offers an important reminder to any fans who may have forgotten that, for a period of around two years, Heskey was an imperious striker who had the full support of the Kop. Carragher describes a game Liverpool lost to Ipswich in which Heskey was rested. The Kop nearly rioted afterwards as the fans demanded to know why big Emile hadn't been selected. "It shows how fickle we all are," Carragher observes. It also showed "how good Emile was, and how badly he dipped before he was moved on".

In this collection of his Liverpool goals the array of commentary is almost unbelievable. Heskey is described as "absolutely deadly", we hear that he "can't stop scoring", that "he's flying now", and that he scored "two goals in two minutes" (what? When did that happen?). "Heskey has spun away well in trademark fashion", "that's why they paid the money", the commentators cry. He's shown celebrating goals with confidence and swagger. There's a series of great headers and clip after clip of him picking it up midway between halfway line and penalty area, striding forward, barging defenders aside, bursting through them like a runaway train and battering the ball into the back of the net.

More crucial than the goals, though, was the role Heskey was asked to play. Robbie Fowler, Jari Litmanen, Wayne Rooney: any number of strikers benefited from having Heskey alongside them but it was Michael Owen who really reaped the rewards, picking up the Ballon d'Or in 2001 following a season in which Heskey's build-up play was integral to his success for both club and country, and in which he himself scored 22 goals. Owen was never more potent than when he was with Heskey. But his success also tells us something about Heskey's primary weakness. In his early years, Owen – before he became the dead-eyed, horse-addicted Dubai helicopter pilot who said he barely felt anything when he scored a goal – had the drive, ruthlessness and intensity that Heskey never did.

Carragher tells a story about Heskey being dropped at the last moment for Michael Owen. "If the roles had been reversed, there's no way Michael would have stepped aside to allow Emile to play such a massive game. Emile possessed the ability to be a Liverpool player, but not the mentality," he writes. There was a period when Heskey was "unplayable" and Carragher says that even Owen was talking about him as one of the best strikers in Europe.

His peers hoped he'd "matured into a striker who'd dominate English football for the next decade" but in the end, it seems as though his shyness or his meekness counted against him. A nice man in a ruthless world, Heskey never made his talent or his natural attributes truly pay – he couldn't claim what seemed to be his, as if he felt he didn't really deserve it or would rather not have all the attention. His manager at Leicester, Martin O'Neill, said that Heskey's confidence was so fragile that if he didn't control the first pass he got in a game, you were probably better off substituting him because his confidence would be blown. In a recent interview with the Guardian profiling his Anfield return, Heskey says he has no regrets and perhaps again there's the key to why he never became the player everyone was convinced he could become. When he was younger, the theory was always that he needed to be riled up in some way in order to have the best brought out of him – just poke him with a stick till he gets irascible and then he'll really start banging them in. Perhaps it was simply that, in the cutthroat environment of elite football, Heskey was too gentle.

And that's why, this weekend, with memories of his Anfield career confined to the past, the Kop sang for him, sang a hymn for a good man who gave far more than we ever really remember. A man who, in the end, will lope off into the sunset, one hand cupping his ear, the other spinning a classic cut of late 90s 2-step that only he can hear.

Follow Oscar on Twitter @oscarrickettnow

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