Rodgers, The Last Man Standing

Louis val Gaal mooted as General Manager or was it as Kenny’s replacement.  Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Band as the back up staff to Roberto Martinez, Brendan Rodgers, Rafa Benitez or was it Hope Powell? She probably has stronger credentials than many of those linked with the job.

With Brendan Rodgers seemingly on his way Anfield the drums are already beating from Liverpool fans that the man in question is out of his depth.  FSG’s decision to sack Dalglish looked uncompromising, but given what we know about the organisation, the decision to bring in Rodgers is in line with the markers the organisation set itself on taking over the club.

Rob Smith of the Daily Telegraph set out four points of action in his column when FSG began seeking a replacement for Roy Hodgson. If one looks at each point one can see that Dalglish was never going to be a long-term appointment and probably only an FA Cup victory may have bought him another season.

By Rory Smith
11:00PM GMT 31 Dec 2010

Youthful

John W Henry and Tom Werner are keen to build the club around a young, ambitious manager, preferably with an attractive style of play and an eye for upcoming talent.

Progressive

FSG's owners witnessed baseball's sabermetrics revolution first-hand with the Boston Red Sox and are determined to run Liverpool in a thoroughly new way. Any candidate will have to be happy to implement new ideas to revitalise a stagnant club.

Adaptable

Damien Comolli, the director of football strategy, would advise Henry and Werner on any change of manager and the successful candidate will need to be willing to work in tandem with the Frenchman on recruitment and long-term planning.
 
Successful

FSG's commitment, they have been at pains to reiterate, is to winning. That is key to their vision for making Liverpool competitive on and off the pitch. A proven record of success may not be necessary, but it will be a substantial advantage.
 
While the Damien Comolli project patently unravelled and the position is rumoured to have been disposed of or at least redefined , one can see that Brendan Rodgers ticks the boxes above.

Liverpool under Kenny produced some excellent performances, but by the same token also produced many lamentable ones too and it appears by the guidelines presented above he didn’t possess the flexibility to move the club forward.  Rodgers with a Swansea team who he geared up to play a cultured type of football with possession and spatial awareness being key factors is as a manager who appears unafraid in bringing through young talent and will as such help FSG restructure the club. 

The owners will have learnt from the last appointment that the next manager has to be media savvy re the Suarez/Evra affair and Rodgers seems to fit quite comfortable in that regard.

Unless Pep Guardiola, Jose Mourinho or even Jurgen Klopp walked through the Shankley Gates fans were never going to be satisfied.  If ever proof were needed just how far we’ve slipped off from our once grandiose position in world football, then the search for a new manager has shown us to be a club working on the periphery with aspirations of getting back into the big time.
 
What we now need is a period of calm and circumspection after the appointment of what will be our fourth manager in two years.  Anfield legend John Barnes said recently how imperative it is for FSG to select the correct manager this time around.  He said “If the club believes in a new philosophy then they need to stick with it, regardless of how well or badly we do in the short-term,” Barnes said.

A new era under Rodgers?

“If it takes two, three or four years to fulfil the plan then we need to give the club time.
“But it won’t take as long as Liverpool fans have been waiting to see the team win the Premier League. Maybe if a system was put in place 20 years ago we wouldn’t still be waiting to win our first title since 1990.

“If we keep changing the manager, the players or the system every one, two, three or four years, we could be waiting another 20 years.”

“I don’t think Liverpool have had a philosophy of how we want to play,” he added. “They’ve seen which players have done well at other clubs and then gone out and bought them.
 
“With your own philosophy you don’t need to necessarily look at the best players in the world – players Liverpool might not be able to afford.
 
“Rather you can go out and buy a player who will do a better job in your team than they do in their current side but it may not cost you a lot of money.

“They may not be able to get (Lionel) Messi but they can get very good players and with a proper system, which I’m sure the new manager will introduce, they can be successful.”

This is where Rodgers needs to have the courage of his convictions and implement his beliefs and style into the Liverpool psyche, after all pass and move is similarly based on possession and spatial awareness.  Under him one hopes that the likes of Suso, Raheem Sterling and Connor Coady get their chance to flourish.  But more than that, it’s about doing it his way and he deserves a chance - interestingly Pep Guardiola had no track record to speak of when he took over as Barcelona and we must give him space to do his job and a chance to implement his ideas.

Ray Houghton’s thoughts on the task ahead summed it up appropriately.  He said, “He’s a very forward thinking manager, he certainly knows where he wants to go but he has to stick to his philosophy on the game, Houghton said.

“I think he tried to change it slightly when he was at Reading when he was under the cosh and there were problems at the club and it didn’t quite work out for him.
 
“But I think he has learnt from that and the question now is will he be big enough to move the club on. The Fenway Group wanted a young man to come in and now they have got to give him the tools to get on with the job, whatever they may be.

“Buying players has to be a priority for him, there are a few at the club that they are going to shift on and Brendan has got a style of football that hopefully the Liverpool fans will enjoy.”

Good luck, Brendan.