He should have put Sterling up top much sooner. Jesus, even I called it before Carra came out and said it. Everyone on here knew it and could see it. And why he persisted, and still persists in some cases with Lovren, Johnson and to a lesser degree Allen is totally beyond me. I also have my concerns about how he sends out the team to defend. It's not the mistakes, they happen. It's the set pieces; we've been awful but against Chelsea and West Ham it looked more promising. I have to add that this has coincided with Mignolet's return to some sort of form. I hope we break the bank for a decent keeper in the summer but I fear a slightly cheaper option! Regarding the 'eye for talent'. I'm not sure I agree. I have just posted something on this and if you look at what we 'might have', with the emphasis on 'might', the future is not so bad. Exepecting so many players to hit the ground running was perhaps a bit too optimistic.
We've fallen hugely over a long time for many reasons which we do not look to have taken to heart and we seem condemned to make the same mistakes I for one do not feel the need to fawn over rodgers for picking players finally that suit his system and style but still feel the awfully poor error of 6 months ago are the reason why we won't build on our 2nd place and looking at atletico selling on player after player makes losing suarez a bit of an excuse for me sorry. If we'd done the right things last summer it'd not be brought up but the reality is once more 4th is close cos other clubs have been poor enough not cos we've done ace. Our recent form is league winning which great but our earlier form was relegation form but we should brush one other the carpet in favour of the other You'll note I've not done so as I've commented on our better form quite a bit (only need to look at progress thread)
Not bad that performance. Bit of swagger and some final product in the end. A big plus has also got to be the clean sheet. We are slowly getting better in that department. Great to have Sturridge back. If he can stay fit and scoring then we could have a good second half of the season going into the next in a positive light which would be great considering some of the **** we've served up not so long ago. Nice Carroll and Downing got naff all out of yesterday. Brought back hideous memories seeing them again. Two big embarrassing parts of our recent history.
I don't really see anyone 'fawning over Rogers' I think everyone on here accepts that he has weaknesses. We generally fall into one of 3 camps. 1) The Patient: Give him time, he's a young manager that makes mistakes and learning 2) The Frustrated: He needs to address his obvious weaknesses relatively quickly, but he's got strengths and wish he'd get the balance right 3) The Had enough: He'll never change. Get rid. I fall into the second category and occasionally (usually right after an abject performance with poor team selection/game management) drop into the third.
I was 2, then 3, and now sort of 2 again! He has mucked up quite a few things but there is no doubt he has the team kicking again which makes me think if we can help him with the elements he struggles with (transfers) and let him get on with coaching, then things might go well.
We finished 2nd last season, had CL to attract players and £75m additional to spend. We're now 7th, heavily rely on an injury prone striker and a 20 year old is the now the star of the team.
Think that's a little harsh mate. There is no doubt some of our signings are kicking in and contributing and Henderson now has more assists then Tia Marie and Hazard. The sharp end of the team is not the whole team.
Some posters are ****ing stupid. Giving Brod praise isn't blindly following to the end of the earth. It's praising him for getting things right; aka playing well and / or three points. Same goes when we were playing poorly. Not all critical posters were saying 'out at all costs' but he rightly got criticised for poor results. To claim he's got so lucky so many times is just plain ridiculous. It smacks of 'don't like Brod, never have and never will' He's clearly not the saviour of the world either. Maybe just a smidging bit of realism is required...? #justathought
Who are these players who were soo willing to join liverpool because of qualifying for the CL for the first time in ages Who got us in the position of that 2nd place? Who got Suarez scoring a ton load of goals that we were able to get 75mil for him? So what if we are seventh? The league still has games to go and it is easy to pick our position as a criticisms rather than the fact we are 5 points of 3rd as it stands and 10 points of 2nd.
Most supporters alternate between 2 and 3. The key IMO is the final ranking at the end of the season, if he finishes 4th or better then he should stay. If he doesn't then I think he should go. He had a relatively first poor season and a relatively brilliant second one. Many including me puts that second season to the brilliance of Suarez rather than him. I am not saying Rodgers didn't contribute. Of course he did but Suarez was the catalyst. If we finish out of CL places this season, will he come good in the future? I think he is a manager that in normal circumstances (without a Suarez ) can take us to between 5 and 6.
Well sisu called you all out so..... Glad my machinations stimulate some discussion this morning For the record my opinion is rodgers is an awful spoofer but with some talent without question.... Either that is camp 1,2 or 3 I don't know but what I can say is as a fan of lfc all that matters to me is lfc That's why I give gerrard stick and am glad he is going for example. Everything is for the club and its best and so I have to call it like I see it and I see it that we ****ed our selves royally in the transfer window
I think we should all look at the big picture. 1. As a manager, has he improved or at least maintained the quality of the team and the squad? 2. As a manager, is he amongst the better managers in football? All discussions around injuries to one striker even the quality of the players he has recruited, team selections are minor detail for the decision makers I.e the owners. Yes Suarez was always going to be difficult to replace but we got£75m to buy good players. Southampton showed that quality can be replaced by quality. For me as a manager, he has not performed well. Yes he has now got a competitive team. But could/should he have done this much earlier than now? His purchases for the money we paid have been poor. Just look at the Southampton buys. Should he have identified and dealt with the Gerrard issue much earlier? Of course he should have. When supporters are clamouring for it then it is far too late. Is he one of the better big club managers around? I don't think so. Quite a few around. Koeman is one of them.
Not convinced calling posters "****ing stupid" is right...but anyway. Blind praise is, to me, what a lot of posters are doing. They're praising him right now (and rightly so) but are also more than happy to sweep the previous 5 months under the carpet with excuses like losing Suarez and Sturridge, new signings still settling in, 'judge my team in the second half of the season' quotes from Rodgers and the unexpected poor form of players. I praise what's necessary regardless of result and I criticise what I see as necessary regardless of performance too - that's usually the time where people here come out with crap like, "FFS we won! Stop moaning." Sorry for not settling for **** performances and scraped wins all the time. If someone plays **** and we win 3-0, I'll still say they were ****. If we lose 3-0 (like United) but play well, I'll say we played well. Losing our two strikers is not bad luck. It's just poor forward planning as I've said before. Rodgers/Committee will have known it was likely to happen at some point and should have had plans in place. They didn't. Sure you can't replace Suarez (well, technically I'm sure you could with enough scouting because we replaced Torres easily enough when others said that wasn't possible and have replaced hundreds of top drawer players before him in our history) but you could certainly buy someone better than Balotelli (and honestly, anyone who felt he was going to be a success or had a chance to be is clueless) and Lambert. It's not an excuse, it's just poor forward planning. New signings always seem to take their time to settle in at our club...Saints don't have much of a problem doing it and they had their team ripped apart. Maybe it's because Rodgers didn't give them a proper run in the team to settle until injuries forced his hand and he had to drop Johnson, Lovren and Balotelli. I remember Can, Moreno and Manquillo having some great performances then getting dropped in favour of 'others'. Lallana too. No wonder they're not properly settled! The ol' judge the team on the second half of the season. Yeah, see Saints again. They managed fine in the first half too. Last is the poor performances from unexpected players - Lovren, Mignolet and Coutinho I guess fit into here in the first 5 months. Coutinho's problem was obvious (and posted on in this board) as a lack of movement ahead of him which gave him nothing to work with. Eventually Rodgers fixed that problem by putting some pace - Sterling - ahead of him (again, commented by people on this board). Lovren and Mignolet, fair enough, but I'm not convinced that the poor form of two players should result in some diabolical team performances. I consider myself very realistic. I praise when needed, I criticise when needed. He's found a cracking formation which makes us defensively stronger without inhibiting our attacking play using some players in surprising positions. My current criticisms of him are (still) the playing of favourites (I think only LVG has rotated more than us from the big 6 which begs the question why change things so much when surely some consistency might actually be better when you have a winning team), why things seem to take him months to identify (poor performers, obvious lack of movement in the team and Gerrard being unable to defend at DM or play next to Lucas) when even some of us lowly, inexperienced 'sofa managers' can spot them and the awful forward planning leading to a dire transfer strategy (If Sturridge gets injured again, we're relying on a 20year old AM to get us all of our goals, someone who's barely played 10 games in that position and isn't a natural finisher and already has a lot of pressure on him for being one of our key players). I don't feel that some recent performances means we should ignore those problems and questioning him means we are not real supporters who can't praise Rodgers. (Btw, I'm not one of those in the 'lucky' camp - although you weren't directly replying to me anyway - but I am in the 'slow to think' camp)
Im not sure which players we could have got but what we did do was spend £50m on 3 average Soton players, 2 of which were supposed to be first team regulars but are clearly not better than what we have. Who got us to 2nd? Credit to Rodgers for building the team around Suarez. But there are far too many people taking credit for that - Rodgers did not build a title challenging team, he created a title challenging attack. The defence and midfield were average and have been since he first arrived. The attack carried the team and the manager Because no top class team needs to score 3-4 goals every game to win a game pretty much every week. At the end of day, he's a very good attacking coach. No doubts about that - but as others have said, the manager and The committee ballsed up by a) not planning for suarez's departure and b) buying terrible first team players in the summer. But we're in this position because Rodgers was hell bent on using a **** formation and the wrong players. We had the easiest group in the CL but won one game. In the final fixture, he plays one of the worst line ups I have ever seen.
