He deserves another season

Sean Rogers, tactical analyst for The Anfield Wrap podcast

It would be disgraceful if after the season Liverpool have had the manager’s position is not being questioned. The summer transfer business, the start to the season, the Champions League campaign, the end of season form and the eventual league position means any manager would more than likely lose their job and deservedly so.

Liverpool, however, is a very, very strange club right now.

Brendan Rodgers is way down the list of problems to fix at Liverpool. Anyone who thinks changing our manager alone will result in trophies and title challenges is living in a fantasy world.

What do the owners actually want from Liverpool? How seriously does everyone at the club want success? What is the recruitment policy? Who does the recruiting? Why do Liverpool have a reputation for missing their top targets, moving slowly and being tight on wages? What is the strategy for the academy recruitment which gets overhauled every three to four years?

Liverpool’s wage bill and net spend leave them realistically fighting for fourth/fifth if they copy the rest. Liverpool have to do things differently if they want to beat the system. This season I believe Liverpool copied the rest and tried to build a squad to compete on all fronts. This was always destined to fail.

Liverpool have a big enough budget to have three players on £200,000-plus a week. They can have an incredible first 13 or 14 players but the budget limitations mean you need to cut your cloth accordingly. That means having a smaller squad and sacrificing the domestic cup competitions. It does not mean spending less than the rest. Even Chelsea and Manchester City can only start 11 players.

Liverpool need to have 13 or 14 European-elite players and pad the squad out with youngsters and academy graduates. Focus on the league and the league only. Continuing as they are means fifth-/sixth-placed finishes for the foreseeable. They need to risk coming ninth to come first.

You can’t coach goals. You buy talent who provide you with numbers in terms of assists and goals and build your team around them in a balanced manner. Liverpool are building a team and squad that is great in the middle third of the pitch and useless in both penalty areas.

One trophy in nine years, one top-four place in six seasons, one season that ended in more than 63 points since 2009, one decent summer transfer window since 2006. These facts are not solely attributable to Brendan Rodgers.

The failure to build a team, purchase players who are ruthless in either penalty area and provide a strategy for league success with a collective responsibility has made the manager’s job a near on impossible job. Rodgers, I think, felt he had to do something extreme to pull this season off and it has led to far too much tinkering and rash moves before and during games.

From the academy to the boardroom to recruitment to the strategy of the club there needs to be a complete overhaul and a commitment to collective responsibility. Once that is sorted then by all means discuss the managers position. But until those things are resolved the manager of Liverpool FC has no chance.

Time to give someone else a chance

Roy Henderson, freelance writer who contributes regularly to The Blizzard

Brendan Rodgers arrived at Liverpool amid great fanfare, with talk of heavy shirts and fighting for his life for this great club. Some fixated on the soundbites, others just cared about the football. And boy did he talk a good game. Swanselona writ large – he would get us playing the football that was our birthright. And if he did that, he would be all right by me.

He arrived asserting that he had refused to work under a director of football, but he quickly discovered, amid a sequence of transfer blunders, that he was far from unfettered. And there, perhaps, lay the seeds of his own destruction.

His inherited squad initially struggled to adjust to his methods, but notwithstanding that, Rodgers finished his first season with momentum, the signings of Daniel Sturridge and Philippe Coutinho sparking something – we didn’t yet know what. But we would soon find out.

The 2013-14 season blew our minds. Liverpool played football the likes of which I had never seen in my life. The best since the mid-to-late 80s. They routinely confounded reason. They scored 101 goals. It was incredible.

But in among the free-flowing madness were seeds of something genuinely mature. We went to Old Trafford and exerted control, with patience and penetration. We were cold and calculating. It seemed we were seeing Death By Football – the football we’d been sold. At that point I believed that Rodgers understood his own blueprint, and despite the likelihood of Luis Suárez’s departure, I was hopeful. Recruit those barmy qualities up front, and rely on an able coach and man-manager to marshal the supporting cast.

But Liverpool contrived not to recruit those barmy qualities. If a transfer committee directs your footballing choices (even if you chair it), do you not have a directorate of football? They tried for Alexis Sánchez and Loïc Rémy – whose qualities were not too far off the mark – but ended up with Mario Balotelli and Rickie Lambert, who while able goalscorers did not offer any of what Suárez has; the mobility, pace, aggression and relentlessness on which the whole thing had been founded.

And so, doubt seeded and germinated. A stolid autumn, and a dysfunctional defence ... but then the 3-4-3 with Raheem Sterling at its head. Pace, aggression, relentlessness. It worked. But he stopped playing Sterling there. I began to wonder if he understood why it had worked in the first place. And then the FA Cup semi-final happened.

Some fixated on soundbites. Some fixated on Steven Gerrard. I just care about the football. If a manager loses sight of what makes his own brand of football tick, then he has lost his way.

Rodgers has laid a strong foundation for the club, despite the current hand-wringing and hysteria; but it is time for someone else to build upon it – to add steel and savvy, and a winning mentality when it matters.

Gerrard leaving is a red herring. The club is full of capable footballers now – that was not true three years ago. But it now needs someone who can really make that quality tell on the pitch.