‘We had no identity and everyone could see it’ early in seasonWin over Burnley on Wednesday would give team 29 points from last 33

Brendan Rodgers believes he would have lost his job as Liverpool’s manager without the “radical” change that has transformed the club’s Premier League season.

Rodgers made the frank admission before Burnley’s arrival at Anfield on Wednesday night when a home victory would give his team a staggering 29 points from the past 33 available. In the leading five European leagues only Wolfsburg have a better points-per-game ratio than Liverpool in 2015.

That Liverpool can entertain the prospect of Champions League qualification for a second successive season underlines their dramatic turnaround since a 3-1 defeat at Crystal Palace on 23 November. That result left the team 12th in the table on 14 points and, Rodgers admits, their manager fearing for his future while devising the new strategy that ultimately underpinned Liverpool’s recovery.

“After that Palace game I felt that it doesn’t matter how much support you have, the team is not functioning and it could not go on really,” the Liverpool manager says. “But I certainly wasn’t going to roll over and die. I will always fight for my life. I love it here and I want to be successful here.

“I understood the situation. My experience at Reading told me that. That’s what I learned from my sacking there. I went in to Reading with the full backing of the chairman, who was great to me, and I got 20 games. Even though it was a three-year project and they wanted me there and I was the guy who knew the club more than anyone, I got the sack after 20 games. Funnily enough it had just started to pick up but they lost their patience.

“What I learned was it does not matter how much support you have in the boardroom, from the directors, the executives, you have to get results and you have to win.

“I needed to make decisions that would allow us to get back to somewhere near what we had been and the transformation of the team, with everyone talking about the system and how dynamic it is, has been good to see. I should have done it earlier!”

Despite his concerns Rodgers retained the unwavering support of the owners, Fenway Sports Group, during Liverpool’s troubled start to the campaign which continued after Palace with elimination from the Champions League at the group stage by Basel after failing to beat the Swiss side at Anfield. That period represented “probably the biggest challenge I have had as a coach or manager at a club of this size”, according to the Liverpool manager.

He explains: “We had no identity and everyone could see it. We just weren’t the team I had built over a couple of years. It was not working and of course that can eat away at you.

“I knew I had to do something radical because I had seen enough of the players to know we were not going to shape up and work as we had done for the previous couple of years with what we had got.”

Rodgers made changes in personnel after the Palace defeat to make Liverpool more difficult to beat. It was only six matches later, for the trip to Manchester United, that he introduced the 3-4-2-1 system that has subsequently revived Liverpool’s season. The 3-0 defeat at Old Trafford remains Liverpool’s only loss in 12 league games using the new formation, with eight won and three drawn, and Rodgers admits he toyed with the idea several times before its introduction.

“I knew I needed to do something earlier than when I did do it,” he admits. “We played the system away at Newcastle but I couldn’t really work on the system in training because we didn’t have the players available at the time. At Newcastle Raheem Sterling played as one of the wide players. So what did I get out of that game apart from a loss? I learned that Raheem probably won’t be able to play wide in what I was looking to do because he’s not in the game enough. He was on the side.

“I was looking at it then and used it in the cup games so I knew what I wanted to do earlier, but after Newcastle we had Real Madrid and I wasn’t going to go into a game of that magnitude with a system that I knew needed more work on.

“It was just about the timing and the timing was right for the Manchester United game. By that stage I was comfortable that we had the players to make it work.”

Steven Gerrard has resumed training having missed Liverpool’s past five games with a hamstring problem but the captain is unlikely to feature against Sean Dyche’s side. Jordon Ibe is facing up to four weeks on the sidelines with a knee ligament injury after the 19-year-old twisted his knee against Besiktas during the Europa League defeat in Turkey last week.