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Mario Balotelli has been taking history lessons – in a bid to become a Grade A student in goalscoring at Liverpool Football Club.

The Italian international is only just 24, but has already enjoyed a well travelled career which has taken in both Milan clubs, Manchester City and now the Reds.

Boss Brendan Rodgers revealed this week that Balotelli has been checking up on great Anfield strikers of the past – and the history of his new home city – in a bid to integrate even more quickly at Anfield.

“He’s a boy who has really looked into the history of the club and he understands the great strikers of the past,” explained the Reds boss.

“We have spoken about Suarez and his time here.

“Remember he’s still young, he still wants to learn, he still needs to learn and that’s the beauty of it for me.

“When I spoke to him when I first met him he still had this keenness to want to learn and when you see his work against Ludogorets, he put his body on the line and he needs to do more of that.

“I think that will come when he gets fitter and getting into good positions will allow him to score goals.

“But he’s well in tune with the history, not only of the club, but of Liverpool.”

As well as building his local knowledge, Rodgers believes that Balotelli’s phsyical condition is also improving and Liverpool will garner the benefit from his improved condition.

On Tuesday Balotelli completed his first 90 minutes for the Reds – and was strong enough to open the scoring in the final 10 minutes of the match.

Rodgers explained: “I’d always planned to keep him on. I took him off in the other two games, but it’s about building up his matches.

“Against Tottenham it was an hour. Then he has been working well, but he was ill leading up to the Aston Villa game but we needed him.

“So he was up to 70-odd minutes then and he will get fitter with the games.

“The idea was to persist with him. He’s a good reference for us and he’s improving with each day that he trains.

“It was a brilliant finish, a wonderful technique, and that’s what we required at that moment, that bit of Champions League class if you want to call it that and he showed that.”

Rodgers added that he was happy to spend extra time with Balotelli in a bid to improve him as a footballer.

“As a coach you’ll always have some players who are low maintenance and some who are high maintenance for different reasons,” he said.

“I’ll spend a lot of time with a lot of the players, but he’s a good boy and he’s prepared to work.

“His workrate tonight (against Ludogorets) was good, okay the ball’s bounced off him a couple of times but we’re trying to improve him in the transition so that when he makes a mistake he can go after it.

“I think we can see he’s trying to put it in for the team and that’s very important because the crowd demand that.

“The players who have been here in the past in that position have been non-stop and he’s becoming atuned to that.

“He’s aware of that.

“He scores goals and if he continues to work, everyone knows he’s got the quality and he produced it when we needed it tonight.”

Balotelli might have celebrated his first goal for the Reds, but he was part of an overall performance which failed to hit the heights.

Boss Rodgers believes that the side is missing key performers like Daniel Sturridge, but that the style which saw the Reds enjoy a run of 11 successive Premier League victories last season will return.

“We need to continue to work well in the league,” he added. “Obviously when you come into this competition and you don’t play so well, you need to win, And we can do no more than that.

“We won the game tonight but we’ve still got a way to go to reach the level of last season and the last 18 months, but we have a few really important players out and when we get them back that will strengthen up the group again.

“Whilst that happens we have to maintain that perseverance and keep working on the training field.

“Our game is about our speed of passing and the speed of our movement and the intensity of our pressure - and I still think we’ve got a way to go.

“I think we demonstrated it against Tottenham, but we’ve lost players in the international break who are critical to that. Once they come back that will bring us back to that level but until that comes the players will continue and show their character.

“We’ll get back to that, it will just take a wee bit of time.”