Brendan Rodgers

[Rowan]

Manager of the Year
Closest we have been to winning the Lg in practically a lifetime for some
The most entertaining football not only for liverpool but any team in the lg
Has nurtured a number of wonderful young talents
Handled the Suarez affair sublimely
Handles the press wonderfully


Give the man some bloody working strikers and lets see what this team can do ...

Klopp is likely not available .... therefore I say stay the course ... This team just needs some decent Strikers ... we have had none all season

I'd have more sympathy with him if it wasn't for the fact that 2 of our dog**** strikers were his picks (Borini and Lambert). Fair enough the main two were out but he handpicked the carthorses that weren't up to the job of stepping in for them.

[Rigadon]

How long before the FSG OUT signs come out? Jees we are a fickle bunch.

wish we could sack some of our fans

[Lecter]

Do you not think the bigger picture is important though? My point was that we are making progress, no matter how small.

I dont know if changing the manager will help that progress or hinder it though.

How do you work out that we have progressed this season??

We have a lower points total, scored half the amount of goals and finished 4 places lower??

[Rigadon]

Embarrassing is what it is.

I dunno supporters talking about thinking about not supporting the club anymore that sort of thing or supporting the manager you know the sort of thing that makes you a supporter ?

[ronanm]

Untenable. How they could persist with this chancer is beyond me.

[Lecter]

wish we could sack some of our fans

I dont get the criticism of FSG

In terms of turning the financial mess round they have done, thats were their expertise was.

In terms of on the pitch, their managerial picks have clearly failed them so far but in this field they have far less experience and knowledge and are heavily reliant on a number of advisors

[Alex]

How do you work out that we have progressed this season??

We have a lower points total, scored half the amount of goals and finished 4 places lower??

Its not just progression on the pitch I am on about. Progression all over. Revenues growing, turning a profit for the first time in years.

Progression on the pitch is all that really matters, but FSG have got us going in the right direction. Regardless of losing 6-1 to Stoke.

[bonzai]

The thing that worries me the most is the possibility that Brendan has lost the dressing room. If that's the case, you cannot get it back. Period. Even if Gerrard and Johnson has gone.

[The_weatherman]

I dont get the criticism of FSG

In terms of turning the financial mess round they have done, thats were their expertise was.

In terms of on the pitch, their managerial picks have clearly failed them so far but in this field they have far less experience and knowledge and are heavily reliant on a number of advisors

Its not just progression on the pitch I am on about. Progression all over. Revenues growing, turning a profit for the first time in years.

Progression on the pitch is all that really matters, but FSG have got us going in the right direction. Regardless of losing 6-1 to Stoke.

I think FSG are doing alright, nothing exceptional but nothing to be critical about, OK they got the manager wrong, in some peoples eyes, but that happens. Now will be interesting what they will do, would like to see them make some more changes though, not only managerial.

[Buzzo]

Brendan Rodgers’ Liverpool signings show a flaw that cannot be ignored

Luis Suárez’s exit, Steven Gerrard’s retirement and Raheem Sterling’s wanderlust have tested Rodgers but what might do for him now is his transfer policy

Barney Ronay mon 25th May

Before Liverpool’s 6-1 defeat at Stoke on the final day of the season Brendan Rodgers had already announced that he was “150% certain” he would remain in his job next season. As with so many aspects of Liverpool’s mutable, oddly unquantifiable progress in the last two years, it might just be best to double-check the figures on that one. By Sunday night, Liverpool’s manager had recalculated. “I’ve always said if the owners want me to go, I go,” he reasoned, pirouetting on his heel with a lithe, finely-balanced sense of sure-footedness that brought to mind something almost entirely unlike Emre Can.

Rodgers is the kind of manager you can’t help wanting to believe in, even just a little bit. If only because of the memory of Liverpool’s best period in his three years to date, that thrilling surge in the previous season when a run of one defeat from January to April was marked by fast starts and sublime, fluent attacking interchange between three players who have, for different reasons, been largely absent this season.

Rodgers has always presented himself as a seductively modern creature, a “process manager” with a fully tooled-up range of coaching neologisms, from state-of-the-art fluent passing football, to his urge to mint new positions, subvert the dominant paradigm, play a false No9 and 3/4 and all the rest of it. Plus, of course, there is that alluringly sonorous Liverpool-shaded persona, in the good times at least, a kind of Shankly-lite mash-up of the magnetic personality, the ringing tones, the grand gestures.

And then, of course, there’s the Liverpool team. Like Rodgers himself, the side have been a little obscured in recent times, hard to get a decent look at. The bald facts are that three years on, and with £210m spent, Liverpool have won no trophies and enjoyed one disappointing Champions League season. And yet in a sense Rodgers has been protected a little through this by the distracting effects of three competing wider narratives.

The first of these we might call the Suárez Distortion. It turns out, with the benefit of hindsight, that not only is Luis Suárez a brilliantly decisive footballer, he is also phenomenally good at helping other players shine. Last year it was Daniel Sturridge and Raheem Sterling at Liverpool. This time it’s Neymar and the recalibrated genius of Lionel Messi. By extension he’s a tonic for managers, too: with the world’s most selflessly, relentlessly intelligent centre-forward in his team Luis Enrique has also been transformed into a revered attacking technician.

The net result is that after three years in which Liverpool have finished seventh, second and sixth it is tempting to conclude that what happened in that middle year is not that Liverpool managed to come second; but that with the outstanding Premier League player of the last six years in their team they failed to come first.

It was always likely Liverpool would miss the 55-goal contribution of Suárez and Sturridge this time round. But even before the invertebrate defeat at Stoke there was a more profound, systemic feel to the team’s congealment.

Liverpool have competed in five competitions this season. The manner of their exit from the running in each has been genuinely disappointing. The Champions League campaign brought just one win, at home to Ludogorets in the opening game. In both domestic cup competitions the big games – semi-finals or against the game’s better managers – continued to elude Rodgers.

The Premier League season disintegrated after the home defeat by Manchester United in March, the first of six losses in 11 games to cap a season that saw Liverpool go from 84 points last season to 62 this.

If Rodgers has been a little lucky it is in the fact the mechanics behind this falling away have been drowned out to a degree by noises off the pitch. First there has been the ongoing furore of Raheem Sterling’s wanderlust. This has undoubtedly been appallingly handled by his agent. But it has also been allowed to encroach as far as possible, to play out as disruptively as any saga anywhere in recent memory.

This is not a first. Star players will always want to leave. Young players often have their heads turned. Rodgers has been unlucky with the way this one has played itself out. But how would Shankly, or Sir Alex Ferguson or José Mourinho have handled it? Or even, in Rodgers’ favour, a manager with a little more obvious on-site support from his board and owners?

Similarly Steven Gerrard’s protracted farewell tour has overhung a large portion of the season. Just as man inevitably hands on misery to man, Gerrard’s sentimental departure has been transformed into exactly the same distracting shadow of the past that has shadowed his own career. Bring me lucky generals, Napoleon said. Rodgers has been the opposite, forced to fight simultaneously on three fronts, only one of them strictly footballing. And yet for all that a great part of managing has always been managing problems, coping with bad luck, funnelling the right kind of energy your own way.

The gripes against Rodgers’ micro-management are well rehearsed. A tendency to lose the big points. A habit of fiddling tactically, a fixed-gear zaniness that is at times more a sign of stubbornness than flexibility. But really what might just do for him now, a mark of underachievement that can’t be obscured by any wider narrative, are his dealings in the transfer market.

The manager must take a degree of responsibility both for the signings and subsequent progress of Fabio Borini (£10.5m), Joe Allen (£15m), Adam Lallana (£25m), Lazar Markovic (£20m) Dejan Lovren (£20m), Mamadou Sakho (£18m), Mario Balotelli (£16m), Iago Aspas (£7.2m) and Rickie Lambert (£4m). Not to mention various expensive add-ons and loanees whose merits have so far remained obscure. For all the good business that may have gone the other way, it is a vast expense in a short time. Juventus, by comparison, have spent no more on a single player in the last few years than the £14.5m they gave Real Madrid for Álvaro Morata.

There is simply a sense of wastage there. Liverpool are the ninth richest club in the world, richer than Juventus, Borussia Dortmund, Milan and Atlético Madrid. But can they really afford to trust the same manager with another three seasons’ worth of transfer budget? Not least when the club is currently still in a transitional phase in its modern existence, working at a level where the margins are still fine, where every decision must be the right one, where every drop must be wrung from the playing assets.

Meanwhile there is a naturally corrosive quality to the churn under Rodgers. Perhaps we saw a little of this in the collapse at Stoke, a degree of emotional exhaustion at the end of three unsettling years, and a period of oddly fascinating, strangely wasteful stasis.

[The_weatherman]

Its not just progression on the pitch I am on about. Progression all over. Revenues growing, turning a profit for the first time in years.

Progression on the pitch is all that really matters, but FSG have got us going in the right direction. Regardless of losing 6-1 to Stoke.

Results on the pitch are on the manager, off the pitch it's FSG, they've done reasonably well, Rodgers less so.

[danperkins]

The thing that worries me the most is the possibility that Brendan has lost the dressing room. If that's the case, you cannot get it back. Period. Even if Gerrard and Johnson has gone.

this is the biggest worry. No coming back from that if it is true.

[Lecter]

Its not just progression on the pitch I am on about. Progression all over. Revenues growing, turning a profit for the first time in years.

Progression on the pitch is all that really matters, but FSG have got us going in the right direction. Regardless of losing 6-1 to Stoke.

Right agree with the progression off the pitch

Its hard to criticise FSG in any way for that. They have done a good job

On the pitch I dont think we have progressed at all, this season has been clear regression


The big thing is I expected a drop off this season but not to the levels we have

United and Spurs have finished on similar points totals to last season but our drop off has been huge

Rodgers talked about finishing 5th as being par, and I wasnt happy with that sort of comment

Now he talks about finishing 6th as about where he expected

Its just all a little too timid for me, much like much of our play and players this season

[cream]

If FSG don't sack Rodgers, it's because they believe it wasn't his fault we sold our only world class player and bought a load of garbage. Gone from title contenders to mid-table in the space of one window.

[5europeancups]

In defence of Brendan Rogers alot is made of the humbling defeat to Stoke the worst since 1963.

Who was in charge then? Some guy called Bill Shankly. Liverpool finished 8th that season.

However on a slightly positive note, Liverpool went on to win the title the following year, and as the cliche goes the rest is history...

I wonder where Liverpool would have been had they fired Bill that year.

Hindsight of course is very valuable but it is worth thinking about the fact that sometimes it is worth thinking about the big picture.

If you pick a man you have to expect that in a game like football where you are at the mercy of 11 men who have too much free time too much money and probably not enough common sense, then expected results do not always go as planned.

It is worth bearing in mind...