It seems that all of the well placed media sources are saying today that Rodgers has three games to save his job. Ok, some are saying ten days, but it equates to the same thing. Three games, ten days, if things don’t go well then Brendan is history.
If this is actually the case then it just tells me that his race has already been ran. I mean, what if - and I realise this is the longest of shots - he somehow wins these next three games, does that mean he’s safe? And if so, for how long? What if we then lost the next three? What then? If the powers that be are going to use the next three games to decide the fate of Rodgers, then his fate has already been decided. He’s as good as gone and the only question is how long they will wait to make it official.
Actually there’s another question: Why wait at all?
Perhaps it suits them better if he gets some good results and is able to postpone the inevitable for a while longer. If Rodgers can somehow limp along until December and they hand him his P45 then, they can say they gave him as long as possible and that he was given every opportunity to turn things around.
They don’t want to pull the trigger on him after seven league games as it makes them look bad. When most people were telling them to make a change in the summer, they felt they knew best (strangely, they always feel that way despite none of them having a clue about a sport they only discovered a few years ago) and not only retained his services, but also allowed him to restructure his coaching staff and spend £32m on Christian Benteke because he convinced them the big striker was the man he needed to make his system work. A system that he had scrapped by September.
Nothing against Benteke, he’s a really good player and has two goals to his name already, but if he was fit for this weekend would he even be in the team? Maybe he would, but he shouldn’t be. Danny Ings and Daniel Sturridge look more suited to how a Rodgers team plays, and it’s quite worrying that he himself doesn’t seem to know which players suit his own methods best. He’s changed tack so many times it’s as though he’s forgotten what he even wanted to do in the first place. I guess it’s a lot easier to look like you know what you’re doing when you have Luis Suarez tearing shit up and you just need to concentrate on what everybody else is doing.
Since Suarez left everything has turned to shit and Rodgers has been powerless to stop it. The owners failed to do the right thing over the summer for reasons known only to themselves. Maybe they didn’t want to pay him off and felt like it was worth rolling the dice in the hope he could turn it around? Maybe there’s a split within FSG and some wanted rid and others (and by others I mean you Mike fucking Gordon) didn’t? Maybe they didn’t want to sack him because they knew fans would expect Klopp or Ancelotti and would frown upon it when they wheeled out Eddie Howe instead. None of us know, we can only speculate.
I’d like to think now though that they’ve got intermediaries out all over the place speaking to potential replacements. They’ve denied speaking to Klopp and Ancelotti and I don’t doubt they’re telling the truth. I’d say it’s a safe assumption that neither John Henry or Tom Werner, or even Ian Ayre, have been flying off and having clandestine meetings with potential replacements for Rodgers, but they’d be pretty damn negligent if they haven’t had middle men ‘reaching out’ to them to see who’d be interested and who wouldn’t.
Rick Parry and David Moores didn’t speak to Rafa Benitez when they wanted him to succeed Gerard Houllier. They sent someone else over there to do it on their behalf though, as that’s how these things are done. If nobody has spoken to Klopp or Ancelotti to see if they have any interest in the Liverpool job then that’s just incompetence of the highest order.
In some ways I feel sorry for Rodgers now as this is just death by a thousand cuts. He’s not turning this thing around and everybody knows it, probably even including him, although you never know with him as he is pretty cocksure of himself. If he was a bit more humble and likeable I definitely would feel sorry for him, but when the inevitable happens he’ll be able to console himself with six million quid and let’s face it, he’s going to be on Goals on Sunday telling Chris Kamara & co how it was everyone else’s fault but his own, so yeah, I don’t really feel sorry for him much.
I don’t bear him any ill will either. I believed in him for a long time, longer than most probably, as it was only after the 6-1 at Stoke that I jumped on board the “Rodgers Out” train. By the time I got on there were no seats left and I had to stand by the door, with my face wedged into the armpit of some drunken sweaty bastard who was clinging onto one of the safety bars for dear life to avoid falling over any time the train went round a bend.
Aaaaanyway… the point is I was late to that party, but even though I disagreed with FSG keeping him in place I was prepared to give it a go and see how things played out. Based on the players we brought in I really thought he’d get back on track. I wasn’t under any illusions that he’d get us back to the heights he reached before, but I did think we’d be much better than last season.
The West Ham game shattered that illusion though. Yeah, it’s dangerous to over-react to one bad performance and result, particularly when a few days earlier we’d looked pretty good at the Emirates, but there was just something about the way we lost that game wasn’t there? It was so painfully bad, and Rodgers was powerless to do anything about it. His answer to being 2-0 down was to go back to the 3-4-2-1 system that got him out of a hole last season. You spend all summer working on 4-3-3 and buying players to fit that system, then you scrap it at the first bump in the road?
The masterplan he came up with over the summer to turn things around has been abandoned already, which just tells you he isn’t in control of what’s happening and he’s desperately trying to stumble onto something that works, as he did for a spell last season until teams figured it out and countered the three at the back system he was playing.
So we all know this thing has ran it’s course and that a change is imminent. Whether it comes in three days, three games or three months, it’s happening so my question would be “why wait?”. Just end this charade now, for everyone’s sake.
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