Steven Gerrard has been cleared of affray after a jury accepted his claim that he was acting in self-defence in punching a man three times in a Merseyside bar. Some years ago I was the victim of a robbery in Liverpool, on my first visit to the city in fact. Returning to the vast QE II Courts for the trial, the same complex where Gerrard would appear as the accused this week, I recall a Scouse detective looking up at the towering red-brick buildings and lamenting to me, "This place will always be busy." Liverpool was England's second city in the 19th century but suffered steep economic decline when its shipping industry died in the post-war decades of the 20th. In freefall during the Thatcher era, crime boomed and the city won an unfortunate reputation as Britain's most deprived and desperate place, a tag it has done much to try to shake off, including being named Europe's Capital of Culture in 2008.