Farewell, then, Brendan Rodgers. “It was a wonderful show of character and resilience.” That was your catchphrase. Also: “Anyone can ask a team to just sit back and defend on the edge of the box.” That was another.
By the end it felt as if the final year and a half of Rodgers’ time at Liverpool – in total 40 months, 166 games (one fewer than Graeme Souness) and no trophies (also one fewer than Souness) – was measured out above all in soundbites and noises off, a constant bickering rehash of errors made, political missteps and arithmetically robust transfer denunciations.
This was perhaps the oddest thing about Rodgers at Liverpool. Six glorious title-chasing months aside, a modestly engaging team punched at occasionally below and only rarely above their own weight. For the manager, however, it has been a bizarrely fraught and angry ride, a rollercoaster of pointless enmity and oddly personal rage.
In the end it really does not matter which view you takes. If sacking Rodgers was not exactly essential, it was certainly understandable. Football clubs are urgent, constantly evolving organisms, for whom managers are only ever semi-permanent employees. Rodgers leaves as one of only two Liverpool managers since 1959 to have failed to win any kind of trophy at all (Roy Hodgson, who was there for seven months, is the other).
Quite clearly he is not the greatest defensive organiser. Attempts to tighten at the back have already led to a congealment in attack, a team drowning currently in a bog-pit of 1-1 draws. Plus there is nowhere left to hide now. This is quite clearly a Rodgers-era team. Against Arsenal Liverpool fielded 12 players either signed or brought through in Rodgers’ time.
And yet there is something about the sheer degree of rancorous detail, the absolute conviction of total failure justly punished that strikes a slightly false note. Asked to pull off a difficult high-wire feat, transforming the Premier League’s fifth-richest club into convincing contenders for the tier above, Rodgers failed but not by a huge amount all things considered.
To an extent it was the tone and texture of his time as Liverpool’s manager that soured as much as results. From the start there were the Shankly-lite-isms, the tendency to over-intellectualise systems and tactics, and an increasing resemblance to a slightly desperate regional sales manager delivering a marketing pitch for a contract he already knows is lost but still producing one last sweatily doomed attempt in the lift down to reception to appear far-sighted and magnetic and compelling.
Beyond this we’re are left with the wider inconsolable fury at money spent, money made, money wasted. It is probably only a matter of time now before universities start offering a masters course in interminable angry data analysis of Liverpool’s transfer dealings in the Brendan Rodgers era. It is a debate without answers, without an end point, depending basically on whether you likes him or not, Rodgers either spent almost £300m gross on a squad that got worse over time. Or he spent on average £25m net each year trying constantly to rebuild an annually depleted first XI.
The key period is June 2014-June 2015, during which Liverpool’s trading can be broken down into the good (£26m spent on Emre Can, Nathaniel Clyne and Joe Gomez) the badly overpriced (Roberto Firmino and Adam Lallana came in at £54m) and the look-away-now as Rickie Lambert, Lazar Markovic, Dejan Lovren, Divok Origi and Mario Balotelli were signed for a combined £70m. It is hardly a glorious procession of hits, although the dreaded Transfer Committee played its part and Rodgers is culpable here too, having essentially brought this one on himself following an early wrangle over Andy Carroll’s place at the club. The committee was a response to his twitchiness. It might be a good system in different hands. Forged out of friction, it was never likely to work. And yet the urge to dwell on all this to such a degree is telling in itself.
There are plenty of undesirable aspects to the over-pillorying of Brendan. The fact is all clubs in the elite have a large amount of natural wastage in their transfer dealings now. Big- money signings often fail. It is wrong. It is chaotic. It is wasteful. But it is certainly not simply the preserve of Brendan Rodgers’ Liverpool.
Meanwhile the things Rodgers has been bad at are not the worst things to be bad at: bad at spin and presentation; bad at playing the game; bad at wheeler-dealering. More damning, he has simply been bad at pragmatism, the need to keep the machine winning at all costs.
At the same time the things Rodgers has been good at, or aspired towards, are things our Premier League managers ought to be focused on. Yes, Rodgers likes to puff himself up over philosophies and tactical posturing, to align himself with the hip young things of European football – so much so it has at times been easy to portray him as a kind of poor imitation of the real thing, Shakin’ Stevens to José Mourinho’s Elvis.
But Rodgers is at least pointing himself in the right direction, aspiring to something progressive, a level of expertise and modernity that might have given him the edge he needed. There were failings. But his strengths, his instincts – the desire to learn, to talk tactics, to attempt to improve players, to coach – are the right ones.
If things turn bad for Garry Monk at Swansea presumably English football will direct a similar level of condescension his way too, rubbishing the previously admired methods, the micro-management, the attempts at least to sound modern and ambitious. Rodgers might not have been the greatest Liverpool manager. He might find his level elsewhere, perhaps in a job where he coaches more and deals with the front-line details less. But at times like these, watching the manner of his departure if not the fact, it is not hard to see why the practice and theory of British football remain in a retarded evolutionary state.
