STAND BY YOUR MAN
If Liverpool want to compete they need Brendan Rodgers
WE forget too quickly: Jose Mourinho was right about that when he talked about those doubting his ability. It is modern football’s way to allow beautiful memories to fade too fast. It is our misfortune that we are willing to let great achievements be overtaken so easily by temporary setbacks.
It happens during autumn’s sack race season every year. Managers’ reputations are trashed or, more prosaically, simply forgotten in the rush to judgment and the obliteration of the past.
We are all guilty of it: media, fans and especially owners.
This season, it is Brendan Rodgers who has been anointed Target Number One. After Liverpool lost to Manchester United last Saturday evening, the phone-in callers were adamant that he should be shown no mercy. Sack him, sack him, sack him, they said, one after another.
Many would have fired Rodgers at the end of last season after Liverpool were humiliated 6-1 by Stoke City. Many were convinced that the club’s owners, Fenway Sports Group, would usher him away in the summer. Most predicted, correctly, that if he survived, he would be under intense pressure from the first day of this season.
Liverpool’s 1-1 draw with Bordeaux in the Europa League on
ENGLAND World Cup hero Matt Dawson’s attempt to perform a spoof of the All Blacks’ pre-match Maori ritual, the haka, was ignorant, illconceived, smug, disrespectful and crass. The stunt, which was masterminded, inevitably, by a clothing firm, was also crushingly unfunny. Apart from that, it was a great idea.
Thursday night stopped the bleeding but anything other than victory against Norwich at Anfield today will lift the opposition towards him remaining at the club to new levels. And yet it is still only 16 months ago that huge crowds were lining the Anfield Road, standing 10 deep, seeking vantage points on garden walls or shinning up signposts, to cheer Rodgers and his Liverpool side of 2013-14 into another home game as they mounted a thrilling title challenge.
Sure, Liverpool fell short in the end, agonisingly short, but what a season that was to be a Liverpool fan. If they had won the league, if they had gatecrashed the cosy club of 21st century title winners established by Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea and Arsenal, it would have been one of the biggest shocks of English football’s modern era.
They did it playing terrific football, too. Rodgers was lucky he had a player of the quality of Luis Suarez up front, of course, a player inherited from Kenny Dalglish, but he made the most of his resources and played a pressing, high-tempo, attacking style that won plenty of admirers.
Maybe some Liverpool fans will baulk at the suggestion that the club winning the title would have been a surprise. Maybe some still believe that a club with their glorious past should be challenging for the title every season and winning their share of championships alongside the Big Four.
But many also realise that the landscape is different now. It has changed radically since the 70s and 80s and the days of Liverpool’s pomp. Oligarchs and oil money have seen to that. Foreign players dominate our league now and the best of them often prefer life in London. Liverpool find it hard to attract the best players these days. Steven Gerrard wrote eloquently and poignantly about that in his autobiography. There was
an air of defeatism about his words when he recounted how the club asked him to approach ‘long-shot’ targets.
For Liverpool now, players like Willian and Toni Kroos are long shots. Gerrard knew there was little chance of persuading them to come to Liverpool when Chelsea, say, were in the running. The absence of regular Champions League football was one drawback. There were others, too.
‘Occasionally a player would say his wife or girlfriend preferred the idea of living in London, Madrid or Paris,’ Gerrard wrote. ‘The clear message was that there were fancier shops and swankier restaurants in bigger cities than Liverpool. I knew then that the deal was dead.’
So Rodgers’ fortunes cannot sim- ply be studied in isolation. They have to be placed in the context of a club that is fighting a long, uphill struggle to regain its place among the elite of the English game with an ownership that cannot, or will not, match the outlandish spending of three of its four main rivals.
Some do not like Rodgers’ style. Some think he is too pleased with himself. Some distrust the way he has changed his image. Some laugh at some of the psychological ploys he uses. Fine. Those impressions are matters of opinion although none of them seemed to matter too much when Liverpool were top of the table the season before last.
The truth is that the path Liverpool have to tread is not an easy one to negotiate. They are searching for something they may never be able to find, which is why their assault on the title 16 months ago swept so many of us away on a tide of nostalgia and optimism.
Rodgers proved himself that season. He graduated as a leading manager. He demonstrated his talent. He showed he has the ability to manage a team and take it to the top. He had a philosophy and he implemented it.
The intervening months have not been easy. Liverpool were driven on that season by the brilliance of Suarez, Daniel Sturridge and Raheem Sterling and the fading greatness of Steven Gerrard. Three of those four players have left the club. The fourth has barely played since May 2014.
Liverpool’s attempts to restock the team have not yet been successful. Mario Balotelli was a spectacular bust. Dejan Lovren has not hit the ground running. He has hit the ground falling. Adam Lallana has only shown fleeting glimpses of his class. Then again, a Rodgers signing, Philippe Coutinho, is fast emerging as the club’s best player.
The reality is that Liverpool cannot climb back to the top by outspending their rivals. They cannot win by might. They have to win by stealth. They have to win by having a better manager and a better strategy. They already have a fine manager and the best strategy is to stick with him.
To adapt Mourinho, Brendan Rodgers is a fantastic manager when he is not winning matches and he is a fantastic manager when he is. Rodgers has already proved he has what it takes. Now he just needs to be left alone to prove it again.