LIVERPOOL FANS ALWAYS THANK ME
Rodgers expects warm welcome as he returns to Anfield for first time since being fired in 2015
FOUR years ago tomorrow, Brendan Rodgers left Liverpool’s training ground for the last time. Having climbed from the team coach and into his car after a 1-1 draw at Everton, his phone rang. Liverpool director Mike Gordon was calling to sack him.
‘I had just left Melwood and I was coming past the Tesco when I got the call from Mike,’ Rodgers recalled. ‘In all honesty people probably knew about it before me. I had many calls late at night with Mike but none like that. But it was OK. I thanked him for giving me the opportunity to work there.’
Rodgers is sitting at a table at Leicester’s King Power Stadium. This is his home now and it seems to suit him. After Swansea and Liverpool and Celtic, one of the most innovative and beguiling managers in English football is building another instantly recognisable team.
Leicester go to Liverpool today and are third to their opponents’ first. It is the first time Rodgers has been back and it says everything for the progress made in just eight months at the club that we are wondering why the game is not on TV. But, first, let us not stray far from the story of that cold autumn of 2015. Suffice to say Rodgers has had better weeks.
Escaping to Marbella the day after his sacking, it rained in Spain for five days. Rodgers then flew to Dubai only to be snapped by a fellow passenger asleep with his mouth open. On his return, however, he still found the decency to do a remarkable thing. He not only agreed to rent his successor his house on Merseyside, he met Jurgen Klopp to show him round.
‘The wives looked round the house and Jurgen and I had a cup of tea and a talk about football,’ Rodgers shrugged.
‘What we said is private but he is a good guy with a good perspective on life. He has been great for the Premier League.’
Hang around football people long enough and you can smell a phoney at 10 paces. Rodgers is not one.
If Klopp — who rents the house in Formby to this day — has the game in the right place in life’s order of things, then so does the man who laid the foundation for what the German has achieved at Anfield.
Rodgers may not have brought Liverpool a trophy but, inheriting a failing team from Kenny Dalglish in 2012, Rodgers pointed a great English sporting institution back in the right direction.
Maybe no Liverpool team has ever thrilled quite like Klopp’s but the Rodgers version was often just as hard to take your eyes off. Only 39 when he joined from Swansea, the Northern Irishman was able to harness the unique and different talents of Luis Suarez, Daniel Sturridge and a young Raheem Sterling to mount a title challenge in 2013-14 that may have been successful had Steven Gerrard not fallen over during that crucial game against Chelsea. Gerrard said earlier this year that he thinks about that moment every day. What about Rodgers? ‘I think about it from time to time,’ he smiled. ‘But I don’t burden myself with it. It was different for Stevie as the captain and really wanting that title. Over the course of 38 games, if you don’t win the league you don’t deserve to. From time to time it will come to me and I will think about how well we played and how well we played in that particular game for 70 minutes. But I reflect more on the season. We did everything we could.’ Asked if his efforts have been forgotten a little bit in the rush to acclaim Klopp, Rodgers is slightly coy. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘But I know what we did there and the climate was slightly different. ‘ When I arrived we were cutting the budget, bringing in guys on loan from Aston Villa to help us. So it was different. ‘But when I travel the world and meet Liverpool supporters everyone talks about that 2013-14 season. I think they realise we did everything we possibly could, especially given where we came in. We made a great jump.’ Rodgers’ Liverpool flatlined after the sale of Suarez that summer. ‘It was like Tottenham selling Harry Kane,’ he said.
His major beef at the time of his dismissal a year or so later was that the club’s transfer committee would not let him sign some of the players he wanted. He admits now that he was too headstrong.
‘I’m much more relaxed now on that front,’ he said. ‘My strengths are managing players and coaching players. When I come into a club I try to make it clear how we want to play, and then you put your trust in your recruitment team and the club to get the players in. At Liverpool, I think it was a learning aspect. For me and for them.’
Still only 46, Rodgers is halfway to the target of 1,000 games in management he once set himself and the encouraging part is that his innate sense of how football should be played remains.
Some managers get less brave as they get older. Failure robs them of their instincts. But in an interview with Jamie Carragher this week, Rodgers said: ‘Safe is death.’ And he means it.
‘The times I’ve gone safe has been the times I’ve lost the identity that I think I’ve created as a coach,’ he said. ‘Funnily enough, I remember being here at Leicester with Liverpool and we were going through a kind of pragmatic stage. We won 3-1 but it wasn’t the type of football that I would promote and I didn’t like it.’ If Leicester are to get anything from Anfield today they will get it their way. ‘It’s the mark of a top team,’ nodded Rodgers. ‘You’ve got to be hungry and relentless in your mentality.’
In early summer, Rodgers sent texts to Klopp, Jordan Henderson and James Milner after watching them win the Champions League.
‘I remember being sat in Milner’s house asking him to come to Liverpool (from Man City) and one of the big reasons he wanted to come was because he thought he’d have the chance to win the Champions League,’ he said. ‘OK, it wasn’t in my time but seeing him last season win the trophy was amazing.
‘I really don’t know how I am perceived at Liverpool but you can never worry so much about that.
‘All I know is that when I come across supporters of Liverpool they always thank me for the time I was there.’