Does Rodgers deserve another season.

[Dr Nowt]

Didn't need to see Jabba The Pizza Hut's melted Play Doh face appearing at the end of that.

[magicrat]

Thoughtful post and you make some very good points Paco

Its easy to see why Rodgers was chosen. Owners that didn't want to match the spending of the top clubs along with a manager who thought he could beat the system.

You get what you spend is the the motto of the story and those that were skeptical about the the whole FSG model were right. It's fair to say we could have done better in the transfer market and tweaked those spend stats a little but there is no free lunch in football or any other business. Cash wins out in the end. A new manager could do better than Rodgers with the squad of that I am convinced but the real key is whether owners spend more money , and spend it more wisely , or whether they cut and run. For all the moneyball jibes they can't be satisfied with our current status in the game and the fans will not stand for it in the end . Revenues must drop as our global standing in the game follows the same path as our trophy cabinet

[Dr. J]

 

Although a different approach may attract more sympathy, there is nothing Rodgers can do about that, but the modern way is to blame the manager, replace him, and begin another cycle.

 

This bit kills me. What oIther approach is there other than keeping him? And if you do decide to keep him, what criteria exist for ever removing him, or any other manager?

 

Managers were fired less often in the past but they also weren't paid the kind of money Rodgers is, nor were they given hundreds of millions of pounds to fritter away on shite players. If he had any decency he'd resign.

[Paco]

Thoughtful post and you make some very good points Paco

Its easy to see why Rodgers was chosen. Owners that didn't want to match the spending of the top clubs along with a manager who thought he could beat the system.

You get what you spend is the the motto of the story and those that were skeptical about the the whole FSG model were right. It's fair to say we could have done better in the transfer market and tweaked those spend stats a little but there is no free lunch in football or any other business. Cash wins out in the end. A new manager could do better than Rodgers with the squad of that I am convinced but the real key is whether owners spend more money , and spend it more wisely , or whether they cut and run. For all the moneyball jibes they can't be satisfied with our current status in the game and the fans will not stand for it in the end . Revenues must drop as our global standing in the game follows the same path as our trophy cabinet

Its by Jonathan Wilson in Guardian. Thought I copied his name in but obviously.

 

I d love to write something so eloquent.

[magicrat]

Its by Jonathan Wilson in Guardian. Thought I copied his name in but obviously.

 

I d love to write something so eloquent.

 

Inadvertent plagiarism ?

[Denny Crane]

It’s surely those manuals that led Rodgers to such excruciating gimmicks as his three envelopes in a drawer, or to the time when he met for the first time a journalist noted for his left-wing beliefs and greeted him, not with his name, as Andrew Carnegie would have advised, but with the word “Comrade”.

 

"Hello comrade" so Brent, I bet he whistled Phil Collins to try and ingratiate himself to Stevie.

[kalasoma]

Thoughtful post and you make some very good points Paco

Its easy to see why Rodgers was chosen. Owners that didn't want to match the spending of the top clubs along with a manager who thought he could beat the system.

You get what you spend is the the motto of the story and those that were skeptical about the the whole FSG model were right. It's fair to say we could have done better in the transfer market and tweaked those spend stats a little but there is no free lunch in football or any other business. Cash wins out in the end. A new manager could do better than Rodgers with the squad of that I am convinced but the real key is whether owners spend more money , and spend it more wisely , or whether they cut and run. For all the moneyball jibes they can't be satisfied with our current status in the game and the fans will not stand for it in the end . Revenues must drop as our global standing in the game follows the same path as our trophy cabinet

 

One of my favourite mottos is: You keep what you kill.

[Russ Atmosphere]

Liverpool over the past three seasons have had the fifth highest average wage bill in the league. Their average position in that time is fifth. This is what they are.

 

Maybe we should be nearer 4th over those seasons, like the cost of our squad has been in transfer fees over the same time. Maybe Swansea, Spurs and Southampton shouldn't be doing better than their positions in the spending graph given that it's what they are.

 

It's all a tad irrelevant anyway as the league is one competition of 3 or 4 that we enter each year and since Rodgers has never beaten a big side in a cup and can barely get past the smaller ones we can finish fifth in the league forever and the fans will still rightly be fucked off because we aren't relevant in any other competitions.

[Jairzinho]

I like Jonathan Wilson, Beyond the Curtain and Inverting the Pyramid are great books, but I just can't be arsed to read a load of excuses for this shit. The manager isn't good enough, get rid.

[johnsusername]

"Another age might have been more forgiving. Matt Busby, for instance, finished second four times and fourth once in his five seasons at Manchester United before winning the league, the fault of luck and, the goalkeeper Jack Crompton believed, of a lack of resources; their reserves weren’t quite up to the job. These days the questions would have become deafening long before that victorious sixth season: did Busby have the toughness required to carry them over the line?"

 

I'm sure if Rodgers had come second four times and fourth once then he wouldn't be under so much pressure as it'd be obvious he had talent. But let's face it - he hasn't, and won't. It's game over.

[Babb'sBurstNad]

There's a weird straw man being attached to most articles now, and it regards our spending / wage bill. It goes thus: Liverpool are fifth in expenditure, it's unrealistic to expect better, therefore Rodgers isn't doing too badly.

 

The problem is no one's complaining about being fifth, they're complaining about the absolute eye-aids of football being played, being a win or two away from Swansea's position and simultaneously looking unconvincing in the cups. 

 

Just once, I'd like an article that mentions spending as the ultimate factor in where you finish, to put in the caveat of where that should put us with regards European competitions. Or even apply it to the better run sides in the Premiership.

[dennis tooth]

Im complaining about finishing fucking fifth its lfc for fucks sake i dont care what the others spend and nor should our manager.

[Dr. J]

 

There's a weird straw man being attached to most articles now, and it regards our spending / wage bill. It goes thus: Liverpool are fifth in expenditure, it's unrealistic to expect better, therefore Rodgers isn't doing too badly.

 

Yeah. Once the line-ups are announced they should have a wallet toss instead of a coin toss. An ounce of lead gets put in the wallet to represent every 10 grand of weekly wages, including the manager's, and each manager can then heave it towards the other team's goal. Closest to, wins.

 

The game is then unnecessary and, in our case, we can run every game from the 80's on the big screen.

[Gym Beglin]

This is the list of people that John Henry follows on Twitter (not many):

 

https://twitter.com/John_W_Henry/following?lang=en-gb

 

And note the three football journo's, Si Steers, Jonathan Wilson, and Tony Evans.

 

Si Steers is aboard the Rodgers out train:

 

Si Steers ‏@sisteers · 16 hrs16 hours ago

This team looks lost with no idea on how to reinvent itself. The squad is hugely underperforming. Change is needed. #LFC.

 

 

 

Tony Evans is, as ever, useless:

 

Tony Evans ‏@TonyEvans92a · Sep 20

What I will say about LFC is sacking Rodgers is not the easy solution it seems. Until LFC get recruitment right, no manager will succeed

 

 

And Jonathan Wilson seems to think that Rodgers could still turn it around:

 

Jonathan Wilson ‏@jonawils · 2 hrs2 hours ago

Modern football, impatience, Brendan's biopic and why the Anfield clock is ticking.

 

Have a read of his article here: http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2015/sep/24/brendan-rodgers-liverpool?CMP=share_btn_tw#comment-60139941

 

You won't believe the slack he gives him. I'm calling backhanders and favours, because this is fucking atrocious.

[Gym Beglin]

Transition, transition, transition. It is the curse of modern football and also its great excuse. Whenever a club are underperforming, it is because they are in transition. To which it is tempting to reply, “Well, stop signing so many players then.” It is not, of course, as easy as that, partly because the club that are not in transition tend to be perceived as in stagnation (and that leads to boredom, which is the worst crime of all in the soap opera morality of the Premier League), and partly because, if you’re not one of the absolute elite, other clubs keep buying your players.

 

Related: Liverpool scrape past Carlisle on penalties but Rodgers’ torment grows

 

For Brendan Rodgers, though, the excuse, whatever validity it may have, is sounding increasingly tired. Anfield is ripe with the stench of resignation. Rodgers arrived at Liverpool in 2012 with a philosophy. He wanted to play the possession-based football that had served him so well at Swansea City. He offloaded Andy Carroll at a significant loss because he did not fit in. Liverpool finished seventh.

 

He recognised that in Luis Suárez, Daniel Sturridge and Raheem Sterling, he had three attacking players of tremendous pace and so he changed the style to something more direct. For a while Liverpool’s football was breathtaking but then they naively fell into José Mourinho’s trap. But still, they finished second.

 

But then Suárez left and Sturridge was injured and Rodgers had to rethink. A raft of new players arrived, he fiddled around, came up with a 3-4-2-1 and the results achieved in the first flush of that experiment propelled Liverpool to sixth. Then Sterling left and a raft of new players arrived and Rodgers is fiddling around again, his problems exacerbated by the loss of his captain, Jordan Henderson, to a broken bone in a foot. He has played 4-2-3-1 and 4-3-3 and, on Saturday, there was a return of aback three against Norwich City with a 3-4-1-2.

 

The fiddling is looking increasingly desperate. Liverpool did eventually beat Carlisle United, sparing Rodgers a Roy Hodgson and Northampton Town situation, but one goal from 47 attempts in two hours against a League Two side suggests both a lack of fortune and a lack of precision. Luck is turning against him. Losing Christian Benteke for a couple of weeks just when they need results is unfortunate; it is doubly so that the toothlessness against Carlisle should come in a week in which Mario Balotelli and Iago Aspas, two players who did not succeed at Liverpool, should score goals for their new clubs.

 

Yet in the first half away at Arsenal, they looked excellent. At other times they have looked stodgy. It has, in other words, been just what you would expect from a new team finding its way. A lot of getting to know you, with occasional moments at which it all clicks. But after six league games, Liverpool have won only twice, against Stoke City thanks to a screamer from Philippe Coutinho, and against Bournemouth thanks to a goal that should have been ruled out for offside. Add that to the dismal end to last season and Liverpool have taken justonly 16 points from their past 15 Premier League games. There is an understandable restlessness about Anfield, a sense that the pattern is repeating.

 

Liverpool over the past three seasons have had the fifth highest average wage bill in the league. Their average position in that time is fifth. This is what they are. It is reasonable to ask, given how many flops they have had, whether they are investing their money as wisely as they should be (might there not have been more of a plan before making the signings? Was Danny Ings really bought to play on the left? What does Roberto Firmino do?) but it is equally true that without regular Champions League football and with their level of spending (on transfers and wages), the players they sign are never going to be fully formed. They are shopping for B+ players who may develop or be inspired rather than A-grade stars.

 

They are trapped in their economic reality but the charm of Rodgers is that he makes interesting tactical changes. He doesn’t just plod along accepting Liverpool’s place in the hierarchy. He tries to change things. He still believes a bright manager can transcend finance. He does things that are different. He does not deny the intellectual side of the game but revels in it. And often this is not a practical application of a theory – it is not like the time Howard Wilkinson used Pythagoras to demonstrate Steve Hodge had not actually encroached at a free-kick – but a love of theory itself.Now that Sam Allardyce has gone, there is no manager in the Premier League happier talking about how he won a game.

 

Which is good, or it should be. Rather that than the endless whining about referees and the construction of self-serving conspiracy theories that characterise so many post-match press-conferences. The problem, often, is one of tone. Victories often become about him rather than the team when traditional wisdom suggests managers should let the players take credit for victories while deflecting attention away from them when things have gone wrong.

 

Take the 3-0 win at Tottenham Hotspur on the third weekend of last season when it appeared that Liverpool might be able to mount another title challenge. Balotelli played well in tandem with Daniel Sturridge and was understandably the subject of much discussion. Rodgers was happy to play along with it, happy to play the role of the horse whisperer who had tamed the Italian. He told a story about how he had made him mark at a corner in training. No manager, apparently, had ever made him do that before. None had had the courage to look Balotelli in the eye and tell him to do the basic stuff others would do as a matter of course. He was encouraging but firm, giving the kid a chance but marking out the boundaries. He was Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting.

 

It brought a lump to the throat and a prickle to the eye, or it would have done if it hadn’t been such obvious nonsense. No one had asked Balotelli to pick up at a corner? Not even, say, Mourinho, who is not exactly noted for letting players duck their share of the defensive responsibility? Or, perhaps, Roberto Mancini? What were all those fights on the training ground about if they weren’t about Mancini trying to get Balotelli to do things he couldn’t be bothered to do?

 

The problem is often one of tone. Football is indulgent of certain faults but, as Steve McClaren found as England manager, it has little time for those who have read a guide to getting ahead in business and are applying those ideas too blatantly.

 

It’s surely those manuals that led Rodgers to such excruciating gimmicks as his three envelopes in a drawer, or to the time when he met for the first time a journalist noted for his left-wing beliefs and greeted him, not with his name, as Andrew Carnegie would have advised, but with the word “Comrade”.

 

None of that makes Rodgers a terrible man or a terrible manager, but it does undermine much of what he has done that is positive. Last season, after Liverpool had gone 13 games unbeaten following his switch to three at the back, there came the stories about how he had come up with the system after long nights of fretting, sustained only by tea and toast.

 

The tactical change was a triumph: no one would deny that. It shored up the rickety centre of defence, it got Coutinho and Adam Lallana playing in pockets opponents found it hard to fill and it created space for Sterling. But then Rodgers, or somebody he had authorised, briefed a couple of journalists on how the scheme had been devised. It was as though Rodgers was already imagining a key scene in the biopic he assumes they will inevitably make of his life. And of course the next day, Manchester United won 2-1 at Anfield, Steven Gerrard was sent off and Liverpool began the slump from which they are yet to escape.

 

Perhaps the timing was unfortunate, but there was also a sense of Rodgers setting himself up for a fall. There are too many determinants in football beyond a manager’s control for him always to claim credit when things go right because if he does then he must also logically always be to blame when they go wrong.

 

Another age might have been more forgiving. Matt Busby, for instance, finished second four times and fourth once in his five seasons at Manchester United before winning the league, the fault of luck and, the goalkeeper Jack Crompton believed, of a lack of resources; their reserves weren’t quite up to the job. These days the questions would have become deafening long before that victorious sixth season: did Busby have the toughness required to carry them over the line?

 

Now resources, greater than ever before and so the differentials more pronounced, mean Liverpool are doomed to haunt the outskirts of Champions League qualification. Whoever is manager of Liverpool will find themselves constrained by the same economics.

 

Although a different approach may attract more sympathy, there is nothing Rodgers can do about that, but the modern way is to blame the manager, replace him, and begin another cycle. The ousting of Colin Pascoe and Mike Marsh from his coaching staff at the end of last season felt a significant step towards Rodgers’s exit. He feels even closer now.

My reply to that in the comments section was:

 

Wilson, this is a very poor piece.

 

You condense the last 18 months into the following,

 

"But then Suárez left and Sturridge was injured and Rodgers had to rethink. A raft of new players arrived, he fiddled around, came up with a 3-4-2-1 and the results achieved in the first flush of that experiment propelled Liverpool to sixth. Then Sterling left and a raft of new players arrived and Rodgers is fiddling around again, his problems exacerbated by the loss of his captain, Jordan Henderson, with a broken bone in a foot."

 

Really. Is that what happened? I take exception:

 

1. A 'raft' of new players didn't just 'arrive', he bought them.

 

2. He had no reason to go to 3 at the back without first trying 2 up front. He didn't even bother trying, he even tried Coutinho as a 'false 9', rather than play Balotelli with Borini, or Lambert, or even Aspas.

 

3. We were propelled to sixth, which sounds decent, but still 8 points short of a CL place.

 

4. The last 9 games of the season, about 25% of the season, yielded 2 wins and 5 losses, including Liverpool's biggest ever PL loss.

 

5. "Then Sterling left"...is only a fraction of the story. Sterling was totally underwhelmed by Rodgers and Ayre and wasn't even offered an improved contract until much later, by then he was already irked enough to engineer a move.

 

6. Another raft of players comes in, again, another Summer where Rodgers selects players he wants and then washes his hands of them when they don't perform...

 

7. Problems exacerbated by the loss of Henderson, his captain. Lest we forget, this is the same Henderson who Rodgers had told could leave the club 12 months earlier. Meanwhile, the former France and PSG captain, Sakho, was left out of squads for unknown reasons and captaincy reverted to new boy Milner, rather than a host of established stalwarts like Skrtel, or Lucas.

 

I could pick holes in your piece all day Mr Wilson, and I'm dismayed that you are one of very few people who John Henry follows on Twitter, and I'd be saddened if he based his lack of intervention on your notion that Rodgers can turn this around and, by extension, should be given more time.#

 

"Just what you would expect from a new team finding it's way".

 

Who are you working for Mr Wilson? Almost every player last night had been at the club for 12 months, even 18 months.

[Russ Atmosphere]

Tony Evans ‏@TonyEvans92a · Sep 20 

What I will say about LFC is sacking Rodgers is not the easy solution it seems. Until LFC get recruitment right, no manager will succeed

 

This doesn't make sense. Rodgers isn't separate from that recruitment process, and he's bringing nearly all of 'his' signings here at over twice their actual values. If another manager didn't haemorrhage the club so much of it's budget we'd only have to worry about the rest of the transfer committee being criminally shit, but it would be a start.

[Dr. J]

 

Yet in the first half away at Arsenal, they looked excellent.

 

This is becoming one of the main fall back positions for Rodgers supports, already nearing legendary status.

 

Years from now, more or less, a  bunch of rummy old cunts will fog up with tears as they sit in their cups boring the shit out of younger supporters with tales of that half: "Lads, lads, if only you could have seen it..."

[moof]

Funnneeee's continuing fake meltdown is overkill. Jonathan Wilson taking backhanders now?

[Gym Beglin]

Funnneeee's continuing fake meltdown is overkill. Jonathan Wilson taking backhanders now?

How else can you explain that shite? It's the sort of scrawl you'd see daubed on a toilet wall in shit.

 

He backs Rodgers because nobody else does, that's his USP, he's 'cool as fuck' and so he just counters every popular belief to try and look like he's thought about it so much more intently than you or I.

 

He's full of fucking shit, and The Blizzard is fucking gourmet shit.

[moof]

The blizzard is superb

[Dr. J]

Thought experiment:

 

Imagine Jonathan Wilson talking up the theoretical side of football with Joe Fagan.

 

or,

 

Archetype football hipster meets trophy cabinet.

[Gym Beglin]

The blizzard is superb

It's Readers Wives for football anoraks.

[moof]

That doesn't even make sense but from the man who once advocated dropping Suarez for Adam Morgan I'll take it as a compliment.

[Anubis]

I agree with Funeeeee over that Wilson piece. It's a list of excuses.

[moof]

I agree with Funeeeee over that Wilson piece. It's a list of excuses.

You agree that he's taken a backhander?