TalkSilly

I think it might be this that forces FSG to pull the trigger with Rodgers. He's more than likely used the lack of a decent striker as his main excuse for last seasons' poor showing and, having got £32.5 million out of them to solve the problem he's not going to have a leg to stand on if we're still failing to score regularly a few months into this campaign. They might keep him in place until next summer if there isn't an appropriate replacement readily available but, as most of us concluded at the end of last season, he's lost this group of players and, once that happens there's nothing any manager can do. I don't have any illusions about how a new manager is going to get on though. This league is getting more and more competitive with each passing season and a club riven with internal divisions isn't going to get very far. The schism, if one really does exist, between the coach and recruitment team needs to be resolved. Rodgers is only partly responsible for the mess the club finds itself in at the moment. How the people responsible for missing the glaring flaws in most of the signings we've made in the last few windows have survived this far is beyond me.

We spent 2/3 of last season in borderline relegation form so I can't see how this one can fail to be a lot better. It's really just a matter of how much we improve relative to the competition. All the money coming into the league is allowing the teams below us to strengthen as well. If nothing else this may mean that they become a lot harder for the top teams to beat making the season even more gruelling than usual. Stoke, Palace, Southampton, Swansea and others are hardly pushovers these days. There were a lot of negatives last season that should be forgotten now. No World Cup hangover. No deflation after losing our best player. No having to accommodate a legend past his best. Instead most of the squad have had a decent break and are joined by new signings who should make them a lot more optimistic. Clyne makes us stronger defensively, Benteke and Firmino will be a much greater goal threat but I think Milner will prove to be the most significant arrival, partly because he will offer a lot more mobility and physicality than Gerrard last season but mainly because he knows how to win games and I'm hoping that might rub off on some of the other players. From what I've seen of him he's not afraid of slipping in the odd tactical foul to disrupt the opposition's flow here and there, something the bunch of choirboys we currently have never do. We are the least cynical team in the league and that's got to change if we're going to get anywhere. I don't want to see us anywhere near the top of the fair play league next season. It also helps that we should be competitive in the Europa League by fielding squad players while last year's top 4 have to take the Champions League much more seriously to progress. Rogers intimated that O'Driscoll was likely to stay behind with the players due to play in the league the following weekend while he takes the Europa League away games on his own. That should be a positive. I don't see why we shouldn't be competing for the CL places and if Sturridge gets fit and starts scoring goals there's no reason why we shouldn't be in the mix at the top. Rodgers has no excuses anymore, it's his squad now. Another damp squib of a season and he's gone.

After 3 years of watching him in the job the balance of probabilities suggest you're almost certainly right sadly. The unbalanced squad may not be entirely his own fault but the fact that such a fundamental question is even being asked of a manager that's now one of the most long-serving in the league says to me that he doesn't really know what the hell he's doing. You encounter people like Rodgers in other areas of work, always over complicating things because they either can't or don't want to see the simple clear truth of the matter they're dealing with. They always end up implementing ludicrously convoluted solutions that create more problems than they solve. He seems so in love with his own cleverness that he probably doesn't even want to come up with a straightforward, effective way of getting the desired results. That would seem boring to him and wouldn't feed his ego anything like enough. Unfortunately characters like Brendan tend to come over as very impressive to those above them who invariably don't have much understanding of what the job in hand really is. FSG in this case.

It would be interesting to know the details of the contracts O'Driscoll and McAllister have been given as the odds on them still being at Anfield next summer are probably no better than 50-50 at the moment. Next season is so front-loaded with difficult games even if the team perform reasonably well we could still find ourselves well adrift of the top 4 by November. That's why Rodgers is currently 7/2 favourite to be the first manager out on his ear. Have we ever gone into a season in this position before? Not that I can remember. It will be a tough gig for Brendan trying to keep the players, fans and FSG believing. I'm certain that being in contention from the very start and staying there throughout was a big factor in our second place finish the season before last. The players go into games more focussed when they have a lofty league position to defend, their mentality won't necessarily be the same if they're way off the pace a few months in. I suppose the only possible positive of having pretty much all our most difficult away games in the first half of the season is that there won't be any room for complacency to creep into the dressing room.

Didn't he used to take the set pieces back in the day? You never know, maybe he'll show someone in our squad how to take a decent fucking corner.

Well there were rumours that Sturridge was irreparably damaged doing the rounds late last year. I suppose you have to wonder why, if the club really thought he was likely to be available a fair bit next season, would they be prepared to spend so much on a lesser player like Benteke? The creativity in Arsenal's midfield allowed them to get by with strikers like Welbeck and Giroud last season, are Ings and Origi really that much worse? Perhaps we'd be better off spending the money elsewhere, Benteke doesn't offer £20 million more quality than what we've already got up front.

It might have something to do with the fact that, by the end of last season, most of us were convinced that our number one was a bit "number two". A situation unlikely to be improved by bringing in a number 2 who's "number 2" too.

What are the odds that he will though? I can't remember a summer when I haven't been able to delude myself into believing that things will be better in the season to come but the abject state of the football side of the club after 3 years of the current set-up has completely extinguished my belief that things will improve without significant changes. There's loads of talent in that squad but I have scant faith in Rodgers' ability to mould it into something resembling a team. After 3 years and £220 million on players he hasn't even settled on a formation, let alone made one work with any consistency. What makes anyone think he's suddenly going to do it over the next month? The fact that we've got all these players but no obvious captain speaks volumes about the squad that's been assembled for me. All those that have anything resembling leadership qualities are either injury prone or not guaranteed a game. And I include Henderson in that if Milner really has been promised a start in central midfield, something I really hope isn't true. A club of Liverpool's stature should never been making that sort of commitment to a player as prosaic as him. Anyway we'll see. The first few months of next season will be intriguing to watch if nothing else.

That's going to be difficult as our first 6 aways are Stoke, Arsenal, Man U, Everton, Spurs and Chelsea. We got 4 points from those fixtures last season. He's going to have to get double that and win most of the home games or he will be in big trouble by the beginning of November. One iffy performance is all it will take to have the fans right back where they were at 5pm on May 24th.

Assaidi, Aspas and Coates have left since last summer, their fees will have covered the purchase of Clyne. The wages shed by Gerrard, Johnson and Jones going probably cover Milner, Ings and Bogdan coming in. Borini and Lambert seem pretty certain to leave and possibly Lucas too which would offset a lot of the up front cost of Firmino as well. In the unlikely event we offload Balotelli we would be getting close to break even on both transfer fees and wages of incoming players. I'm not particularly enthused at the prospect of blowing most of the Sterling money on Benteke. I'd prefer to wait until they'd at least had a chance to have a look at the new strikers in pre-season. Origi especially is supposed to be similar to Benteke, that's why he made the Belgian world cup team last summer. And it's probably not a bad thing to keep some money back with Rodgers' position being so precarious. Being able to offer a serious transfer budget either for January or next summer wouldn't hurt in any negotiations with a prospective new manager.

Trouble is the few striking prospects out there: Lacazette, Vietto etc are either going to be ludicrously expensive or won't come to us anyway so I reckon Ings and Origi are our lot for this summer. Lambert won't be difficult to shift for roughly what we paid and Borini has to go somewhere he's going to get a game if he wants any chance of re-building his career. What we'll do with Balotelli God knows. I've always wondered where the decision to take him was made and whether it was anything to do with the football people at the club at all. From the outside the club is starting to look like a serious mess. Apart from drip feeding 3 free transfers that were almost certainly done deals months ago out to the press there has been complete radio silence since the season ended. I can't find any mention of the departures of Marsh and Pascoe on the club website and the latest rumours about the promotion of Pepijn Linders from the U-16s to first team coach suggest that, unless someone much more experienced comes in as well, they're just going to assemble what, to outsiders, will look like a temporary, makeshift team around Rodgers for the pre-season, which starts in 3 weeks time. His stock looked at rock bottom with the players at the end of last season, that won't do anything to improve it at all. I wonder if FSG haven't reached an impasse with this particular investment and have no idea where to go from here. They've played all their "smartest guy in the room" cards but the club is still going backwards. They've been trying to apply their rational analysis to a sport that utterly defies rational analysis. You can throw insane sums of money at it, like City, and still find your club getting no further than the first knockout round of the CL every season or you can employ a team of people that have what might seem like a plausible, intellectually sound approach to getting value from the transfer market but put together an unbalanced squad full of ineffective players that end up worth less than you paid for them. If it doesn't make any sense to those of us who have been following the game closely for 40 years, it must be baffling to them. Maybe that's why the club seems completely directionless at the moment.

I wouldn't be surprised if FSG are very confused about what's gone on this season and don't really have a clear idea of how to react. Me too. I can't remember such a strange set of results and I've been following the club since the back end of Shankly's reign. This is how it went: Once Sturridge got injured and the CL started we sank into relegation form in the league, only picking up 16 points from 14 games, along with a series of woeful CL performances and just squeaking through a couple of League Cup ties. In mid-December Rodgers finally comes up with a way of us providing some sort of attacking threat and we're suddenly the form side in the whole of Europe embarking on a 23 game run where we only lose 2 cup games, narrowly, and take 33 points out of 39 in the league. Then, supposedly, Van Gaal works Rodgers' system out, or notices that Fellaini is a foot taller than Joe Allen more like, Gerrard loses his rag and we slump back into relegation form earning only 8 points out of 27 in the league and lose after a pathetic display in an FA Cup semi-final. There are plausible explanations for the autumn slump and the mid-season upturn but why did they drop off so badly after the Utd game? If they hadn't had the barely functioning QPR and Newcastle at home during that spell it would almost certainly have been 2 points from 27 and that performance at Wembley was fucking shocking considering what was at stake. There have been plenty of seasons in the recent past where there's been nothing to play for from early January onwards but there has never been a collapse in form that catastrophic, ever. What caused it? I suppose the obvious thing would be that something happened around the Utd and Arsenal games that completely turned the players off Rodgers. The rumoured dressing room ructions after the game at the Emirates might have been the straw that broke the camel's back. There were also suggestions of a big fall out after the game in Madrid so they may have already had serious reservations about him that were cemented in place by his reaction to those 2 defeats. Once that had happened they pretty much packed it in for the season. Players will play for a manager they don't much like as a person if he keeps telling them to do things on the pitch that get results. Once he stops doing that his days are numbered. That's where Rodgers appears to be now. I hope FSG understand the implications of this and remove him. Bringing in a manager new to this league like Klopp might be a risk but he does have a record the players will respect and, from what I've seen of him, the sort of open, honest personality they will respond to. Judging by the last 10 games of the season appointing him would seem a lot less risky than leaving Rodgers in the job.

Maybe they've sounded Klopp out and he's not interested or perhaps they feel they have a process to go through with Rodgers before letting him go, who knows? The other possibility is that their relative inexperience in matters football mean that they don't properly appreciate the grave message the players were sending with those last 2 atrocious performances. They've been awful for 2/3 of this season but the Palace and Stoke shows were as clear a distress signal as any group of colleagues could broadcast. They just don't buy into what Rodgers wants them to do anymore. If he stays no one is going to be surprised if a fair few of them are agitating for a move this summer. I don't have that much of a problem with the resources FSG have put at the club's disposal, it's the way they're deployed that the issue. Youngsters don't progress unless they have the right group of experienced players around them to learn from. You might prosper having a few in your first eleven at any given time but, if the majority of your team is plastered in Clearasil going out onto the pitch you're not going anywhere, especially in a cynical, lowest common denominator environment like english football. The fact that they haven't twigged that their strategy is flawed is worrying. The alarm bells should have been ringing after the transfer committee's first summer when they managed to turn £20 million into Ilori, Aspas, Alberto, a handful of first team appearances, 1 FA Cup goal and the worst corner in the club's 120 year history. Could there have been a clearer indication that there was a problem with some of the algorithms they were using? As for Rodgers, I was working with a couple of Reading season ticket holders the summer he was brought in. They thought it was hilarious that he'd managed to land himself a job as big as Liverpool and painted a picture of a deluded, Walter Mitty type who talked as if he'd got the Barcelona job when he turned up at the Madejski then plunged them into the relegation zone and got sacked after a few months. I'd give him a lot of credit for his first 2 seasons but he seems to have a utopian footballing outlook that just won't work in this league. I can't have been the only one thinking we looked a hell of a lot like Kevin Keegan's Newcastle last season. You can't rely on your forwards always being at the absolute peak of their form all the time, the team has to be able to shut up shop and grind out results some of the time and we've shown no sign whatsoever of being able to do that. I think he might do a lot better somewhere like Spain, in fact if Moyes gets tempted back to the Premiership that San Sebastian gig would be perfect for Brendan.

Problem with that is that the next manager won't have any money to spend unless Sterling is sold.

I remember Peter Hooton saying FSG regarded Rafa as being like "Pol Pot" when they were recruiting after Kenny was sacked. Unless something has happened to change that view I doubt he will be our next manager.

Not sure whether this is always the case but managers and their retinues normally get a year's money as compensation when they get binned mid-contract don't they? Rodgers has got 3 years left on his deal so if the feeling within FSG is that there are better candidates out there they may as well pull the trigger now rather than give him another season. It's not a reliable indicator but the Mirror are reporting that Klopp's SkyBet odds to be the next Liverpool manager came in sharply last night so maybe something's afoot. I think you can make a reasonable case for next season being better even if Rodgers stays. He won't have the "what to do with Gerrard" issue to deal with for a start and the squad will get a longer holiday, although England's Euro qualifier isn't until 14th June for some ridiculous reason. It's also likely that a few of last summers acquisitions will contribute more after a season of adjustment. When fit Sakho has been a lot better in his second year and Mignolet reproducing the form he's shown in the last few months for a full season would see a few less points dropped. I don't think we're going to comprehensively solve the goal drought via the transfer market. The few prolific strikers available will have better offers from elsewhere. Benteke doesn't really fit our style of play and he'll probably go to Chelsea anyway. Ings and Origi aren't top quality yet but they are the right type of forward for the way we play and Ings has scored 10 in the league this season, he might score 15-20 in a better side which would make a difference to our points total. I also think the rest of the players who get into advanced positions have to step up and start scoring more. If Rodgers has one focus during the pre-season it should be on trying to coach the rest of the players who get forward to stick the ball in the net. Frank Lampard scored loads just smacking the ball through a crowd of defenders perhaps our lot could try that pin ball thing a bit more. Just creating that entropy in our opponents box might actually result in more chances. We'd have to get more players in the box to take advantage though, most of them seem to think that you're only allowed in there for corners. Anyway, judging by Dalglish's prompt exit I guess things will happen pretty fast next week if FSG are going to give Rodgers his cards. If they don't I'll still be hopeful next season will be better, how much better will be the question.

I think that's the most depressing thing about our current situation, if the decision makers at the club gave the impression of doing a competent job and our relative lack of success was solely down to a relative lack of cash it would be a lot easier to accept, but they just don't. For a start the pitch - how did one of the elite clubs in global football end up with a playing surface that looks like the Baseball Ground circa winter 1973? Did it not occur to anyone last year that the impending stadium expansion might impact on that and get it sorted out beforehand? No, it seems. Whoever had that responsibility failed to do their job properly, one of many. Also, after Sterling's performances during the second half of last season and his inclusion in the World Cup squad, wouldn't it have been a good idea to bump his money up a bit and get him to sign up for another 5 years? Not a chance, that would require foresight, something the club sorely lacks these days. I don't know whether these sorts of failures are symptomatic of rank incompetence or a short-term, penny pinching ethos that's coming from the owners, all I know is it's making the club look amateurish and second rate. Rodgers, Ayre, the medical team with Sturridge, all of them look pretty damn clueless to me. Each and every decision they make looks suspect. The latest example of this is offering Toure another year's contract when we have 2 much younger centre backs out on loan, 3 if you count Wisdom. Will Toure really be able to do much of a job for us as he approaches his 35th birthday? I doubt it, so why bother keeping him on when there are younger players who could? FSG seem ever more detached from their investment these days, I'm surprised that there hasn't been more comment about them not having the courtesy to come over and bid farewell to the probably the club's greatest ever player last weekend. They need to pull their fingers out and start making some changes or their foray into the world's most popular sport will not end well.

Hindsight I know but Rodgers has spent £210 million on 20 players with another 4 coming in on loan. Instead, we could have spent that money on say 3 £40 million and 3 £30 million players with commensurate wages and, perhaps, been better off. It's not as if many of the players he's recruited have made much of an impact anyway. All this "buying value" stuff is commendable but not if you end up having to move on most of your purchases at a knock down price because they turn out to be rubbish and that's what we're going to end up doing.

You are almost certainly right Dennis, but I've got to have some hope, however forlorn, to cling onto. I'm starting to think that the only thing that's going to turn this club round is an exceptional crop of youngsters coming through in a short space of time. On the last 20 years evidence we certainly seem utterly incapable of buying and integrating decent players from outside the club anyway.

I agree and that's probably what FSG will do. Since he arrived we've shelled out over £200 million for 20 players, half of whom have been abject failures and and not one has been a completely unqualified success for me. I'd let him spend any money he can bring in through flogging off the many failures but certainly not a penny more. Without CL football we won't attract anyone worth having anyway. It also wouldn't surprise me to see the transfer committee binned off soon either. It was a laudable attempt to solve our chronic recruitment problems but it plainly isn't working. I'd set up a separate squad of fringe players and youngsters for the Europa League and put one of the coaches in charge of those games. If we get into the knockout stages it might be worth putting more effort into but the risk/reward is too skewed to take it seriously before then. The one glimmer of hope is that nearly all the squad will get a decent break this summer and Rodgers will have a full pre-season to knock them into some sort of shape. On top of that, there's a good chance that some of last summer's acquisitions will perform better after a season acclimatising. I don't have any faith in Lovren, Lambert or Balotelli upping their games but Markovic, Moreno and Lallana might kick on. Ibe and Origi will hopefully bring something extra as well.

Of this season's loanees Wisdom was apparently jeered off by the home crowd after an hour of a terrible game against Spurs at the end of January and hasn't played for West Brom since so that particular loan hasn't exactly gone well. Similarly Ilori has had an injury plagued season at Bordeaux, only making 10 appearances and hasn't played since mid-Feb. Both will be 22 in the summer so it may be time to decide whether their futures lie at Anfield or elsewhere. Alberto has made 13 appearances for Malaga but hasn't played since January so they probably won't be interested in keeping him. I read somewhere that Sevilla are going to exercise their option to buy Aspas though, he's scored 10 in 19 appearances for them. Coates has spent most of his time at Sunderland injured or on the subs bench, he signed 4 years ago so he can't have that long to go on his contract anyway. Teixeira seems to be doing well at Brighton so we'd probably get a few quid for him in the summer if Rodgers decides he can't use him next season. Looks like only Origi is likely be part of the squad next season but I wouldn't be surprised to see him loaned out again, maybe to a premiership club, if we bring in a more established forward in the summer. That might depend on whether we can find someone stupid enough to take Balotelli off our hands.

A lot of their squad aren't exactly in the first flush of youth either. They're going to have to replace a lot of them in the next few years if they're to remain competitive. It won't be so easy if FFP stays in place.

I was quite keen us snapping him up but now you've said that I've gone right off the idea. Any thoughts on Ings? My enthusiasm for him needs snuffing out as well.

We were linked with him last summer. Can't see us bothering with him when we have Origi and, potentially Ings arriving. The other Lazio player we're linked is Onazi who'd be worth signing for his name alone. I reckon that Rome trip was just a romantic jaunt, Pascoe was winding the press up when he said Rodgers was on club business. Rodgers said himself that the next few windows would be quiet after last summer's bulk buying so I don't expect many arrivals this year, more about players leaving I'd say. If Ings and Milner can be persuaded to sign along with a new backup goalkeeper that might be it.

I wasn't suggesting that he wasn't a good manager - just that without the emergence of the "Class of 92" he probably wouldn't have had such a long and successful spell at Old Trafford. Luck plays a major part in all these things.