Rodgers tells his Foxes to be like Mike and work for success
IN mid-April, when he was still recuperating from the coronavirus and suffering headaches and bouts of breathlessness, Brendan Rodgers began watching The Last Dance, the documentary about the relentlessness of Michael Jordan and how he drove the Chicago Bulls basketball team of the Nineties to their last NBA Championship.
For the previous couple of weeks, the Leicester City manager had been focused on getting better and trying to make sure he was fully recovered in time for the return of training, but studying Jordan made him want to get in touch with his players again as they began to contemplate resuming a stellar season that had embedded them in the top four.
Rodgers got off his sick bed and recorded a video message. ‘I don’t know what you’re watching while you’re off,’ he said to them, ‘but if you get the chance, start watching The Last Dance.
‘If you want to know what being elite is and what being at the very top level in terms of preparation is, and focus and improvement and being better and winning, this is what you should be watching.’
Rodgers was transfixed by the series. He had read books by Phil Jackson, the Bulls coach, and was fascinated by the way Jackson engaged emotionally with all the Bulls players, not just Jordan; that
Jackson knew how to get the best out of each one and accepted that leadership means recognising different characters need different treatment.
As much as any Premier League coach, Rodgers is a student of human moves, a motivator who is as good a man-manager as there is in the English game. It is a paradox of his success that his detractors identify in him a lack of sincerity, yet it is his care for his players, his desire to help and improve them, that those who have worked for him say lies at his core.
‘Jordan was blessed with talent,’ says Rodgers as he sits in his office at the Leicester training ground, ‘but he maximised his talent. His mentality of being the best and being elite — every player should follow that. It was about the work he put in and how much he was prepared to suffer.
‘I know some people had a problem with the way Jordan behaved towards his team-mates but we judge people on today’s standards when that was more than 20 years ago and the world was different. He wanted to win and he wanted others to win.
‘It was like that in football as well. Times have changed but at the very highest level, sometimes you have to be harsh to be clear.’
There are other reasons why the documentary resonated with Rodgers and why he hoped it would affect his players.
Leicester reached for the stars four years ago when they shocked the football world by winning the Premier League and now, clear in third place, they are attempting to rejoin the elite by using their last nine games to cement a place in next season’s Champions League.
But things have changed since they put themselves in that position. Football has changed.
Last night, the sixth round of coronavirus testing unearthed zero positive cases but there will be no crowd at Vicarage Road on June 20 when Leicester take on Watford in the first game of the first Saturday of the resumed season.
Maybe some of the players will be nervous about grappling with opponents. Perhaps they will be unnerved by the sound of their yells echoing around the empty stadium.
Rodgers knows that. He knows that different things are now required of his man-management, too. He has to find new ways of motivating players. The adrenaline and inspiration that comes with the noise of the crowd will be gone.
The hostility, and the love, will be gone. ‘So you have to find a cause,’ says Rodgers. ‘If the supporters aren’t going to be there, we have to find a way. It’s about emotionally activating the players in order to play as if there were supporters there, with that intensity in our game. It is within our grasp to have an absolutely brilliant season. It is finding that leadership to ensure we are ready for every game we play.’
To provide that leadership, Rodgers will need all his man-management skills and all his empathy. Like all the best coaches, he has the ability to make his players feel special, to make them feel 10 feet tall when they run out on to the pitch. He is more of an analyst than a rabble-rouser but he can get to his players just the same.
Like many in the higher echelons of the game, Rodgers has done his best to help during the coronavirus crisis. It emerged last week that he had donated a quarter of a million pounds to the Northern Ireland Hospice organisation to try to replace the funds they have lost through the temporary closure of their charity’s shops and help them save jobs and services.
The idea that he is all about smooth and slick is still peddled by some but the more Rodgers has brought success to Liverpool, Celtic and now Leicester, the less it fits.
Naked ambition only gets you so far before the players see you have no clothes. They work a manager out like kids work out a teacher. They have a keen sense of who is looking out for them and who is not.
They see through empty words and gestures and stop responding.
‘You don’t have success with players unless you can be sincere and they believe you,’ says Rodgers. ‘I have always tried to be clear with players and cared for them when they have shown that they care.’
Having contracted the coronavirus himself, Rodgers was particularly aware of the concerns of players about returning to training in the midst of the pandemic. He wanted the season to resume, rather than for it to be decided on a method like points per game, but only when he was satisfied that the conditions were right and the players felt confident in their surroundings.
In the managers’ Zoom meetings, it has been reported that some were gung-ho about the resumption of the season. Rodgers will not say anything about what was discussed in those meetings but he says he was cautious about football’s return to work.
‘Football’s my life and I love it,’ he says, ‘but it doesn’t go above health and family. I wanted to return but only when it was safe. Because we cannot afford in life to have any sort of mistakes with this type of thing when we see the tens of thousands of families who have been affected so badly.
‘Football is a caring industry. It is a ruthless industry but at these moments, a lot of football people have stepped up because that is their nature. They want to help and at the right times they have done that. There was some unjust criticism around footballers. Football will come out of this well.’
Rodgers, 47, is only the second Premier League manager — after Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta — known to have had the coronavirus. He felt so sapped of strength he found it hard to walk, he says. It reminded him of the way he felt when altitude sickness started to grab at him on a climb of Mount Kilimanjaro nine years ago.
‘Walking 10 yards felt very, very different,’ he says. ‘I went for a run the first time, and I just couldn’t do it. I could hardly go 10 yards. I felt really weak, had no real appetite, and had a weird sensation for three weeks of having no taste. I never felt I would have to go to the hospital, so obviously it was nowhere near the level of what some poor families have been through.
‘It was like a flu initially. You lose your strength. The headache is so specific, you find it on one side of your head. Normally, you think you’ve got a sore head but it was isolated on one side of my head. And it was the breathlessness of it. I can see why it would affect people with respiratory issues so badly.’
Rodgers says it is ‘amazing’ to be back at work and to be on the training pitch with the players again, especially now they are stepping things up and that all the competitive instincts are returning in full contact training sessions.
There is, though, one regret he will admit to, in relation to his weeks away from the game.
‘I failed in one of the goals I set myself for the lockdown, which was to learn to cook,’ he says. ‘I had a few ideas of dishes I might be able to master but I never got further than an omelette. I have had to take a long, hard look at myself and admit that my attitude wasn’t good.’
Jordan was blessed with talent but maximised it to be the best