Which Brendan Rodgers Will We Get Next Season?
Article by Red Phil
Before this last season began we’d have been suicidal if Brendan Rodgers had decided to leave yet, a mere one season on from then, some, perhaps most, fans would be quite happy for him to leave. Now that he is staying we need to see what we are getting in the coming season.
When we were so close to winning the league he couldn’t do any wrong but now his judgment is being doubted like never before. When he arrived he brought the passing and ball-retention game that he used at Swansea and, with Suarez and Sturridge in superb form up front, the end product of those tactics and the goals our strikers accumulated ALMOST won us the league . . . but then something changed.
True, and I’ll never tire of saying this, we couldn’t really expect to lose somebody such as Luis Suarez and hope to do as well the following season, all things being considered.
Perhaps the first major problem we brought upon ourselves was to effectively think we could replace Suarez with a combination of Lambert and Balotelli and with a packed midfield supporting them. It didn’t work and, in retrospect, was never going to work. I suggest that the manager, or his transfer committee, made a complete hash of that decision.
Then, by bringing in some new players, more-or-less untried youngsters, we somehow lost the ability to hold or control the ball. In fact, against some teams THEY seemed to have the ball more than we did, which was completely different to the previous year. Who was to blame for that? Who decided that we should have such a small squad, with few of them taller than the average milk bottle! Did we score a headed goal last year?
Most certainly we lost the blistering pace we had up front, with Lambert too slow and Balotelli somehow not connecting the idea of football and physical effort as being somehow inter-twined. Without that pace we lost the ability to counter-attack and that had been a major part of the previous season’s tactics. Again, couldn’t the manager have seen that was likely?
Many players seemed to go backwards, not forwards, in their development. Joe Allen had a forgettable season, as did Jordan Henderson and Lucas. Sturridge, of course, had a season to forget as he hardly played due to injury and that could not have been foreseen when going into our first few games. It most certainly wasn’t in the manager’s plans to effectively lose BOTH of our star strikers for the whole season, or very near it Perhaps the previous year’s attacking excellence hid a lot of defensive weaknesses, I don’t know, but what on Earth happened to us defensively last season? My God, we were awful, woeful and shocking.
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It has to be said that some of the manager’s purchases were, at best, dubious or, at worst, awful. Moreno could settle nicely if given the chance to play his rightful role as fullback, Emre Can is NOT a full-back or central defender so when are we going to see him in his rightful place in the midfield? Markovic looked a bit lost, a bit out of his depth and Adam Lallana didn’t play enough to be seen as a regular, mainly due to injuries.
Balotelli was the worst of the lot, by a mile. His purchase must go down as the worst-ever by any Liverpool manager . . . yet he is supposed to be planning to remain on Merseyside, rather than leave. I cannot see the logic behind that thought process if you work on the theory that football players supposedly want to play rather than sit on the bench, which he will be lucky to do next season.
Kolo Toure and Sakho looked horrendous last year but the club have offered Toure another contract, which he has signed, and Sakho looks as if he will be part of our defensive unit again next year as we are ripped apart by mid-table clubs again because of it. Again, we must blame Brendan Rodgers for not getting rid of these sort of players. To offer Toure another contract literally defied belief after his shambolic performances towards the end of last season and Sakho has the worst first touches I’ve ever seen in a professional footballer.
No, we’ve lost the ability to play like we did the previous season, the manager bought very unwisely and we looked poor. There is no other word to describe last season other than poor . . . although garbage, awful and dross also spring to mind as being suitable words.
Can Mr Rodgers bring back our ability to dominate play, to create, to defend, to play with pace and to score from whatever chances we create? Only time will tell but I haven’t got much faith in his idea of which players we need to bring in, I cannot work out why he lost the tactical edge we had the previous year or the lunacy of regularly playing players out of position and switching formations several times per game, not per season.
If we can get the Brendan Rodgers that almost won the league back to take us forward, and performing well, and not the idiot who couldn’t stop changing tactics and formations and playing players in positions that were totally unsuited for, great! But if the REAL Brendan Rodgers is the one who messed-up so badly last year then, sorry, I want him OUT!
We’ll know a lot at the start of next season. If Sakho, Toure, Lambert, Borini and Balotelli are involved, we are doomed! A good summer of selling and buying and we just COULD improve next year.
Which is the REAL Brendan Rodgers? Only time will tell, but if the one we had last year re-appears next season he’ll be gone by Christmas when we are already ten points behind the big boys.
RED PHIL
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It wasn't most fans wanting him to go, it was mainly young and foreign fans brought up on instant gratification by bad parents who thought nothing of going into debt to please their little darlings.
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