For some time now, every time our thoughts turn to the England football team, we are told that one team ain’t big enough for the both of them. And so, as an elegant experiment, the two of them were brought together in different teams, just to see what happens.

When Steven Gerrard, of Liverpool, and Frank Lampard, of Chelsea, become Gerrard’n’Lampard of England, they have somehow not added to each other, but subtracted. The so-called golden generation of English footballers has disappointed time and again, largely because two of its most talented players don’t get on as colleagues.

They are both very much “one for all and all for one” types, as we saw right from the start of last night’s tumultuous Champions League semi-final, second leg between these clubs. But when it comes to England, they would do anything for anybody except each other.

Even when they play in the same side, they are fundamentally in opposition. That is why the experiment of placing them on opposite sides in a game of such high stakes was so compelling.

Which is the more skilful? Who has more force? Who has the most important talent of all from a goalscoring midfield player, to act as the team’s heart? They are men who occupy the same ecological niche in too many ways for them to be comfortable with each other.

You could see them eyeing each other up in the centre circle as play began, looking for each other’s well-known weakness, sizing up each other’s well-known strengths and, above all, each other’s appetite for the occasion. But there was, at the same time, a great wariness. You see it sometimes in two equally matched stags.

Instead of going for each other hell for leather at the first opportunity, they walk around each other and alongside each other in a curious stiff-legged way. Don’t start me! Don’t bloody start me! Both contestants know that, in this context, commitment will be a very serious matter indeed. Wait till the moment is right; then, give it everything you’ve got.

Gerrard was the first to demonstrate this pair’s traditional shoot-on-sight policy: a great big right-footed galumph that went wide. The competition for the itchiest trigger-finger in English football is a close call between these two, with no one else even close. Each is like the man in Tom Lehrer’s hunter: you just stand there looking cute, and when something moves, you shoot.

But it was when Gerrard elected to delegate the shooting that this game reached its Big Bang. Everybody knows a Gerrard free kick: a straight wallop at the goal, or a looping wallop into the penalty area. But, instead, after being felled by Joe Cole, he got up and played a low, scudding and unexpected square pass, and Daniel Agger placed the ball beyond Petr Cech with commendable calm.

It was a classic Gerrard moment, and there you could see the difference between him and Lampard. Lampard can change a game by what he does; Gerrard can change a game by what he is. There is a diffidence about Lampard; Gerrard is a man who always wants to take things over. This somewhat overwhelming nature has tended to get in the way for both of them when in the same team. But it was Lampard who was undone when Gerrard took the game over last night.

Lampard, like his side, was up against it, working against the flow and the nature of the game. He offered some arcing free kicks, some elegant, not-quite-productive corners, but he knew that something more was required. The fact is that each player suits his club. Gerrard is a great rider of emotion, the sort of thing that comes from decades of tradition. He has always been something of a throwback, the forthrightness of the maximum-wage man can be seen in the way be plays.

But Lampard looks as if he is playing in a nice suit. He is emphatically a footballer of the 21st century, carrying his wealth and his fame with a becoming ease and helping a team to transform itself from middle-rankers to the elite of the world game. No tradition, no obvious emotional depth, but a sense of style and self-certainty.

As the game hotted up in the second half, Lampard began to demonstrate a few lessons in the art of cool, always rather more a Chelsea than a Liverpool quality. As the No 8s continued their duel in the centre circle, Lampard’s scalpel-sharp passes pushed Chelsea onward. There’s more than one way to lead. The duel continued throughout the endless tracts of extra time and still there was nothing to choose between them. As both sides struggled to break through, so Gerrard and Lampard, each in his own way, sought to make the decisive intervention, the single second of force and awareness that would change everything. Each seemed less than himself, not so much overawed by the occasion as wanting too much to dominate it. Familiar story. Lampard sent a wild free kick across the goal, Gerrard had an even wilder shot thump the advertising boards.

So this match, this duel, was to be decided by the dreadful absurdity of penalties. This is no way to settle a duel within a match, still less a tie of such fraught emotions. Gerrard scored his for Liverpool, sending Cech the wrong way. Lampard scored his for Chelsea, with a sweet rising drive. But in the din of Anfield, Lampard was the only Chelsea player to score; all the Liverpool players scored.

The No 8s once again failed to give of their very best when the other was around. But Gerrard must travel to Athens to play in his second Champions League final while Lampard must stay in London. Perhaps Gerrard will buy him a bottle of ouzo.