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Brendan Rodgers needed his first year in charge of Liverpool FC to size up the scale of the task ahead of him at Anfield.

But managing director Ian Ayre believes that the Reds “infectious” young manager is now completely at ease at Anfield and ready to build on a promising second half of last season.

“Brendan is a fantastic person to work with,” said Ayre.

“He’s quite infectious, a great person to spend time with and he’s very personable with the players.

“One of the things I see him do on the odd occasion I go up to Melwood is he zeroes in on individuals around training. At the end of training he will go round and speak to everybody.

“I think it took him most of last year to understand the size of Liverpool Football Club – and he said some of this himself in the final couple of months of last season.

“I think coming from Swansea as an ambitious, young, successful manager and stepping into the Liverpool club was overwhelming in terms of size – certainly not in terms of his ability – and I think he felt that as he went through the season he got more and more used to that.”

Ayre added: “There’s all sorts of elements to it and he had a fantastic second half of the season.

“He never stops working, is always on the phone, very collaborative and we work great as a team here so we’re very optimistic about this year.

“We’ve made some good investments in the transfer window and we will continue to look at that until the end of August.”