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As he moves within touching distance of a miraculous title triumph, it is hard to conceive that just four years ago Brendan Rodgers was ­apparently unemployable.

“I applied for jobs and didn’t even get a reply,” the Liverpool manager reflected on the grim time after he was sacked by Reading.

“Things got so bad, I couldn’t even get a ticket to a game.” But now Rodgers is leading his side into a battle with Spurs that can all but confirm a top-four place.

Champions League football alone would be remarkable, given the club almost went bankrupt. But Liverpool are now looking beyond their target of simply rejoining English football’s elite.

Yet even among the frenzy of a title challenge – and the greeting given to Liverpool’s team coach on Wednesday night shows frenzy is the perfect word – Rodgers still has time for others less fortunate, as Barnet boss Martin Allen explained this week.

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“I was invited to the Sunderland game out of the blue when I wasn’t working, and it included watching training and a stay over,” the former Gillingham boss said.

“I think it shows great humility thinking of others like that, especially with his team flying high, with all the media demands and requests left, right and centre.”

For Rodgers, such an act is a recognition of the time he suffered the agony of the sack, and the rejection that went with it. Even now, with his stock so high, he is driven by those memories.

“I got the sack on December 16, 2009. It was 5pm on a Wednesday. It was the first time in my life I was out of work and out of football,” he recalled, with a flicker of pain behind his eyes.

“I went to Dubai to reflect for 10 days and wrote about my experience, how it could have been different, what I could improve, what I should take into my next job. I was getting ready to go back into work when my mother died on February 3.

(Image: Getty)

“So I was out of work and now had the two biggest voids in my life – the loss of my mother and football. I wrote to three clubs to see if I could get a job, or even an interview for a job. I didn’t get anything. I didn’t even receive a reply from one of them.

“Two clubs were in the ­Championship and one in League One. I didn’t get an interview and my managerial career was over before it had started.” Rodgers writes to every manager who is sacked, sharing their pain, and inviting them to Anfield to watch training, and keep the football connection.

His motivation is simple. With a young family and no future, he knew what it was to face the bleakness of rejection.

“People say what’s your success? The word for me is failure, that’s how you succeed,” he explains.

“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 either disappear and become an Academy director, 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 suppose that fear of failure is what drives me on.”

And driven he is, with the 5-0 win at White Hart Lane a turning point in his season. “I felt after the game at Tottenham, it was the moment where the players thought in a big game we had performed how we perform every day in training,” he said. “I just felt a significant belief.

“It went from there, having relief, to having belief that we can win every game we play.” Belief. It is a quality that could yet provide the most unlikely title triumph in perhaps 40 years.

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