The first time I met Brendan Rodgers he offered me a job.

After joining Liverpool as manager in 2012 he told me he wanted me on his backroom team. I accepted the offer.

The second time I met him he had changed his mind and decided to promote Mike Marsh from the Academy instead.

I’m not sure what happened in those couple of weeks but I often wonder what might have been. Maybe I would still be at Liverpool rather than working in the media. Maybe I would have been bitten by the coaching bug and going through the same emotions as Steven Gerrard this weekend, coming up against a manager I worked with and using all my experience of how he works to try and get the better of him.

I know how much Rodgers and Gerrard respect each other. At the start of Brendan’s Liverpool reign his coaching impressed us. It was not the easiest time to become Liverpool manager following a tempestuous few years for the club and at the start of a rebuilding process on and off the pitch. Stevie and I were in our 30s and past our peak. Easing long-serving players out is not straightforward for any manager going into one of the world’s biggest clubs – we are the last to accept it is over – but he had to do that.