Brendan Rodgers

[Sarb]

Has anyone noticed increasing number of our players giving interviews on talksport. Definite PR charm offensive by the club. Sturridge, Flanno and Mignolet to go with Rodgers regular ones

None of them talk about the title though even when pressed

[dom9]

Mission accomplished.

[Pablo]

Has anyone noticed increasing number of our players giving interviews on talksport. Definite PR charm offensive by the club. Sturridge, Flanno and Mignolet to go with Rodgers regular ones

None of them talk about the title though even when pressed

Football Focus too, Sturridge last week, Sterling tomorrow. Definite attempt to make Liverpool everyone's second club IMO.

It's absolutely working too, everyone loves us!

It's a dramatic turn around from the hatred we received after the race row. Impressive stuff!

[Shaggy]

Football Focus too, Sturridge last week, Sterling tomorrow. Definite attempt to make Liverpool everyone's second club IMO.

It's absolutely working too, everyone loves us!

It's a dramatic turn around from the hatred we received after the race row. Impressive stuff!

What about before and after the Sunderland match the other night on Sky? A full half hour programme dedicated to an interview with Sturridge! Unbelievable really.

[Sarb]

Football Focus too, Sturridge last week, Sterling tomorrow. Definite attempt to make Liverpool everyone's second club IMO.

It's absolutely working too, everyone loves us!

It's a dramatic turn around from the hatred we received after the race row. Impressive stuff!

Definitely

Arn would be praising our PR lady now!!

[Pablo]

It's nice to be liked too isn't it? Works in our favour

I love the begrudging respect and fear I receive now from non-Liverpool fans in work. Everyone one of them to a man thinks we're awesome and has trouble giving me stick about any aspect of the club.

[dom9]

What about before and after the Sunderland match the other night on Sky? A full half hour programme dedicated to an interview with Sturridge! Unbelievable really.

Maybe, with all the complaints about bias from Sky to United, Mourinho, and their ilk over the years, maybe Sky just like backing a safe bet. If you're in the ascendency (now there is a peculiar football cliché not often found elsewhere) then Sky, Talksport and their shallow, ratings driven ilk will be falling over themselves to get a piece of the action.

It's normal I reckon.

Not having Rafa in charge obviously helps to...

[john316]

Rodgers in the PC just been told Sherwood said he wonders if LFC can handle the pressure.

Rodgers replied by totally shrugging it off and saying "and if you've spent over £100m you expect to be up there challenging"

I can imagine Brenno saying that with that little grin of his as well

[Sarb]

Sherwood trying to crank up the pressure. Difference is there is no expectation on the players to win the title and i think Rodgers is hammering that home aswell

Dont see how we can be disappointed with this season unless we totally **** up the last 7 games

[G]

Sorry to be the party pooper. But can we keep talk of Rafa in the Rafa thread? Especially if it doesnt relate to Brendan.

Why do people always need to compare.

Rafa-Istanbul=Legend but no longer here.

Brendan is here now and will make his own legacy.

[Yozza]

From big mac to big cheese! How Brendan Rodgers swapped scrapheap for top table

BRENDAN RODGERS does not just reel off the rough date football turned its back on him. He can recall the precise day of the week - even the exact minute.

Over the six months that followed the man now lauded throughout England for leading Liverpool's title challenge into the final throes of the season, staring down both Chelsea and Manchester City, would go on to hit rock bottom.

Rejection was followed by bereavement, and frustration, before a shot at redemption arrived while he was sitting with his kids in McDonald's.

As Liverpool tear up the Premier League such a scenario seems like a lifetime ago. And yet it is a little more than four years since Rodgers found himself as an out-of-work manager struggling to be taken seriously after Reading dispensed with his services.

"I got the sack on December 16. It was 5pm on a Wednesday," he said. "My objective then, because it was the first time in my life I was out of work and out of football, was to make sure it did not spoil Christmas for my family.

"I started writing to a few clubs to see if I could get a job, or even an interview for a job. I didn't get anything.

"There were three clubs - I won't name them out of respect to them. I received a reply from two. Two were in the Championship and one in League One. I didn't get an interview and felt my managerial career was over before it had started."

It had been another letter Rodgers penned that kickstarted his climb back to the coalface.

This time it was written to himself, drafted on a sun lounger after Christmas was out of the way, chronicling everything he would do differently from his tenure at the Madjeski Stadium, where he won six of 23 matches, if he ever returned to the dugout.

"I went to Dubai to reflect for 10 days and started to write in the sunshine about my experience," said Rodgers. "How it could have been different. What I could improve. What I should take into my next job. What areas would I be better in when I was next a manager?"

The letter stretched to 11 pages, and the words he wrote provide the context of what he has gone on to achieve.

There was a note to be more clinical in his approach, not wait for solutions to fall into place but confront the need to make big decisions. Consider the treatment of Andy Carroll, loaned out before he kicked a ball for Rodgers at Liverpool, and it can be traced back to that point.

Rodgers is able to laugh now at the day soon after his return from Dubai that he pitched up at the City Ground to watch his son Anton play in an FA Youth Cup game for Chelsea against Nottingham Forest. He had been left a ticket but no car-park pass, and he tried to wing it.

A steward waved him away, pointing him instead in the direction of a public car park a mile away. On the walk back realisation dawned on Rodgers that he was on the outside of the game he loved.

He was to be blown further off course with the death of his mother, Christina, from a heart attack at the age of 53, leaving her son mentally fatigued.

"I got back from Dubai and was ready to go and my mother died on February 3," he said. "So I was there, out of work, and now had the two biggest voids in my life; the loss of my mother and football.

"I was recovering mentally and decided to go to the gym, get myself fit and then start writing to a few clubs."

There is a pause before he continues. "Then I got a call from Manchester City and I thought I'd probably have to go in the coaching game again for a couple of years to get my name back.

"How it all worked out was I was sitting in McDonald's one day with my two children. I got a call saying Swansea were keen to speak to me. On the Friday of that week I became the manager of Swansea. That was the six months."

In many ways, it was the making of him. He spent four days gaining unprecedented access to FC Twente's title charge under Steve McClaren and, remembering his treatment there, Rodgers now makes a point of contacting sacked managers and inviting them to Melwood.

"People say, 'What's your success?' The word for me is 'failure'. That's how you succeed," said Rodgers. "Whatever way you dress it up, something hasn't worked.

"For the first time in my life I felt I had failed at Reading. I probably read the script wrong thinking I had three years and instead I had 20 games.

"Either I disappear and become an academy director, where I'd been for 14 years, or I show character and perseverance and go again. Thankfully I was able to do that.

"I certainly have not had it presented to me. I found out the hard way. I respect former players and top players who get the opportunity - and rightly so - but I never had that protection. I had to go down a different trail. That fear of failure is what drives me on."

At Anfield tomorrow, the arrival of Tottenham will serve as a reminder of how everything has come full circle. It was the 5-0 drubbing of Spurs in December that Rodgers regards as his watershed moment at Liverpool. There have been 11 wins and two defeats in the 15 league games since.

"The Tottenham game was the moment where the players thought we had performed in a big game how we perform every day in training, and we had done it at a ground where we had struggled for a number of years," he added. "In that moment it went from having relief to having belief that we can win every game we play."

[Sarb]

What a man

[Norbs]

Great read

[Shaggy]

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/liverpool-v-tottenham-why-brendan-rodgers-box-of-tricks-can-steal-title-9222531.html

Liverpool v Tottenham: Why Brendan Rodgers’ box of tricks can steal title

Liverpool manager’s ability to get the maximum from squad has produced a league challenge that puts better-resourced rivals to shame. Ian Herbert reveals his morsels of motivation

The observation felt like a David Brentism at the time, confirming some of the early doubts that the immensely cynical world of elite football, always looking out for bull****, had for a rising star who had maybe swallowed one management manual too many.

“It’s not just about training players, it’s about educating players. You train dogs,” Brendan Rodgers said in the 2012 Being:Liverpool documentary, which was one of the club’s less bright ideas. “Player plus environment equals behaviour,” he added, in another of the more excruciating soundbites from the series.

Those observations have a rather different ring about them now. As we reach the denouement of a Premier League season dominated by David Moyes’ plaintive declarations that his inheritance is not all it was cracked up to be, it did not entirely escape attention that the Liverpool starting XI which pummelled Manchester United at Old Trafford 13 days ago included eight players Rodgers had taken on from his predecessor, Kenny Dalglish.

Rodgers said on day one – in his quintessential way – exactly what Moyes has been insisting about the United squad he adopted. “I need to align the playing group with the supporters. There is an imbalance at the minute,” were his words when he was presented to the world as Liverpool manager 21 months ago, adroitly grafting on to his assessment of his players a compliment to the fans which revealed an immediate intuition as to what makes them tick.

By a combination of tactical prowess and motivational power, Rodgers has equipped Liverpool with the best collective mentality in the Premier League this season and made good on what he inherited. His success – and Liverpool’s position a point off the Premier League summit – damns Moyes’ struggles all the more.

There are question marks about Rodgers’ transfer market activity. Iago Aspas, Aly Cissokho, Luis Alberto and Mamadou Sakho cost more than £37m between them and have yet to make much impact. But Steven Gerrard’s observations about Rodgers’ modus operandi were far more significant than the customary post-match propaganda, when he spoke after the game at Old Trafford.

“He manages every single player,” Gerrard said. “He knows we have different characters in the dressing room. His one-to-one management is the best I have known. He makes you go out on to the pitch feeling a million dollars, full of confidence and belief.”

This is precisely the Brendan Rodgers who his former charges will talk about to anyone who cares to listen. A half-hour in Garry Monk’s company a year or so ago was intended to be a discussion of Michael Laudrup’s Swansea but Monk wanted to linger on the memory of Rodgers instead. “We loved him to death,” Monk told me, describing how the Northern Irishman would make it his business to know what every player was into, outside of football – “whether it’s golf, movies, cars or something like that, he will tap into that. Not in a devious way. When you’ve got that sort of understanding with someone, you want to do your best.”

But this level of accommodation with the players comes – as the Liverpool squad will now admit – with an honesty bordering on ruthlessness when needs be. “In the canteen, they would all go up to him, smiling and laughing,” says another witness to Rodgers’ years at Swansea. “But he expected them to be able to take it when he told them they were not good enough. He would not pull punches.” It is this blunt honesty that Monk, since succeeding Laudrup at Swansea, has declared to be the most important management lesson he has taken from Rodgers.

The Liverpool manager confirms this today, in his discussion below of how his dismissal at Reading in 2009 changed his mindset. He returned to the game from that – which coincided with the sudden death from a heart attack of his 53-year-old mother Christina, with whom he spoke every day – intent that players might get a second chance, but not a fourth or fifth. Chris Wathan, the south Wales-based Western Mail journalist who knows him as well as any, will never forget the intensity with which Rodgers always spoke of this time – “one of the most learned periods in my life”.

Like so many of the managers who have not made the grade as a player, Rodgers is absorbed with detail in a way which suggests that he knows he must make up with intelligence what he lacks in experience. He was talented enough as a young player in Ballymena, Co Antrim, to be spotted, early in the Alex Ferguson era, by Manchester United scout Eddie Coulter, who more recently discovered Jonny Evans. Rodgers’ appearances at schoolboy level for United – alongside a far superior compatriot and friend Adrian Doherty, whose premature death at 26 is one of football’s many stories of tragically unfulfilled promise – are relatively unknown. A congenital knee weakness meant he knew he would be no more than a journeyman, so Rodgers set a course through youth management at Reading before Jose Mourinho hired him at Chelsea.

Some say the years in junior football honed his emotional intelligence, as he inveigled his way into the affections of families whose sons he wanted to sign. It was also a period which developed his interest in improving and rehabilitating players, which has been fundamental to the last two years at Liverpool. The Manchester United boardroom is acutely aware – and impressed – with Rodgers’ recasting of Gerrard as a regista (deep-lying playmaker) this season and, though Mark Gower of Charlton Athletic is not exactly in the Gerrard mould, he, too, attests to Rodgers’ capacity to recast a player.

Gower was a failing Swansea winger – on a road to nowhere, years after Tottenham had let him go – when Rodgers’ arrival at the Liberty Stadium repositioned him at the base of the side’s midfield. Gower was shocked to hear Rodgers referring to Claude Makélélé’s equivalent switch from the wing, as a 26-year-old, in a press conference discussion of his own positional change. Gower, just like Gerrard, felt “a million dollars”. He never looked back.

Rodgers rescued others at Swansea, where they liked to say he would take on “birds with broken wings”. Few thought Wayne Routledge, another Tottenham reject, had much of a prayer. Rodgers restored him.

“He’s like a teacher,” said Liverpool’s Jon Flanagan. “You listen. If you take his advice on board and give everything, the opportunity will come. But every day, it has to be 100 per cent. You have to take it seriously.”

There has been serendipity about Flanagan’s emergence at Anfield this season because Rodgers would have loaned the defender out if he could only have found him a club. But the 21-year-old is testament to Rodgers’ disinclination to close his mind to a player. Jordan Henderson, whose degree of improvement has also surprised some of Roy Hodgson’s England scouting team, is another who Rodgers was willing to wait to be proved wrong about. Joe Allen, in whom he invested £15m, is also displaying signs of Liverpool class at last.

Waiting and hoping are not easy at Liverpool, a club of very great expectations, which has made Rodgers’ assiduous work on his relationship with supporters another sophisticated triumph. His casual reference at his first press conference to becoming the club’s second Northern Irish manager – as if the name of John McKenna, Liverpool’s first, should be assumed knowledge – was deft. His exhortation to the fans to lift their support levels for Wednesday’s match against Sunderland, which created scenes reminiscent of the 1980s glory nights, had echoes of his call to supporters to go dressed as Elvis to Swansea’s last game of their first Premier League campaign. He had stored away the fact that one commentator had suggested that “The King” was more likely to be seen on the Mumbles than Swansea survive that season. They duly broke the record for the highest number of Elvis impersonators standing in one place.

“We were brought up not with the silver spoon, but with the silver shovel,” Rodgers told that documentary of his upbringing as the eldest of five brothers in working-class Carnlough, and everyone laughed at the sound bite. But he has dug Liverpool into the position they occupy this weekend. Few titles would be more attributable to one man than this one, if Liverpool can hold out and take it.

[dom9]

I would love to have been a fly on the wall at his interview with FSG. I wonder he told them.