Liverpool FC Team Talk/Gossip/Rumours Thread 2013/14 Mod warning post#7005

aramush

Enjoy the weekend for anyone heading over, hope we get the right result

hefferboi

Sad

gimli2112

so want to post in the utd thread "as a Liverpool fan..... " but I've nothing to say cos I really don't care
one game at a time

Utopia Parkway

Very revealing article on Rodgers in the UK Indo yesterday. Must read for any Pool fan.

Ian Herbert Author Biography

Friday 28 March 2014


The observation felt like a David Brentism at the time, confirming some of the early doubts that the immensely cynical world of elite football, always looking out for bull****, had for a rising star who had maybe swallowed one management manual too many.


“It’s not just about training players, it’s about educating players. You train dogs,” Brendan Rodgers said in the 2012 Being:Liverpool documentary, which was one of the club’s less bright ideas. “Player plus environment equals behaviour,” he added, in another of the more excruciating soundbites from the series.

Those observations have a rather different ring about them now. As we reach the denouement of a Premier League season dominated by David Moyes’ plaintive declarations that his inheritance is not all it was cracked up to be, it did not entirely escape attention that the Liverpool starting XI which pummelled Manchester United at Old Trafford 13 days ago included eight players Rodgers had taken on from his predecessor, Kenny Dalglish.

Rodgers said on day one – in his quintessential way – exactly what Moyes has been insisting about the United squad he adopted. “I need to align the playing group with the supporters. There is an imbalance at the minute,” were his words when he was presented to the world as Liverpool manager 21 months ago, adroitly grafting on to his assessment of his players a compliment to the fans which revealed an immediate intuition as to what makes them tick.

By a combination of tactical prowess and motivational power, Rodgers has equipped Liverpool with the best collective mentality in the Premier League this season and made good on what he inherited. His success – and Liverpool’s position a point off the Premier League summit – damns Moyes’ struggles all the more.

There are question marks about Rodgers’ transfer market activity. Iago Aspas, Aly Cissokho, Luis Alberto and Mamadou Sakho cost more than £37m between them and have yet to make much impact. But Steven Gerrard’s observations about Rodgers’ modus operandi were far more significant than the customary post-match propaganda, when he spoke after the game at Old Trafford.

“He manages every single player,” Gerrard said. “He knows we have different characters in the dressing room. His one-to-one management is the best I have known. He makes you go out on to the pitch feeling a million dollars, full of confidence and belief.”

This is precisely the Brendan Rodgers who his former charges will talk about to anyone who cares to listen. A half-hour in Garry Monk’s company a year or so ago was intended to be a discussion of Michael Laudrup’s Swansea but Monk wanted to linger on the memory of Rodgers instead. “We loved him to death,” Monk told me, describing how the Northern Irishman would make it his business to know what every player was into, outside of football – “whether it’s golf, movies, cars or something like that, he will tap into that. Not in a devious way. When you’ve got that sort of understanding with someone, you want to do your best.”

But this level of accommodation with the players comes – as the Liverpool squad will now admit – with an honesty bordering on ruthlessness when needs be. “In the canteen, they would all go up to him, smiling and laughing,” says another witness to Rodgers’ years at Swansea. “But he expected them to be able to take it when he told them they were not good enough. He would not pull punches.” It is this blunt honesty that Monk, since succeeding Laudrup at Swansea, has declared to be the most important management lesson he has taken from Rodgers.

The Liverpool manager confirms this today, in his discussion below of how his dismissal at Reading in 2009 changed his mindset. He returned to the game from that – which coincided with the sudden death from a heart attack of his 53-year-old mother Christina, with whom he spoke every day – intent that players might get a second chance, but not a fourth or fifth. Chris Wathan, the south Wales-based Western Mail journalist who knows him as well as any, will never forget the intensity with which Rodgers always spoke of this time – “one of the most learned periods in my life”.

Like so many of the managers who have not made the grade as a player, Rodgers is absorbed with detail in a way which suggests that he knows he must make up with intelligence what he lacks in experience. He was talented enough as a young player in Ballymena, Co Antrim, to be spotted, early in the Alex Ferguson era, by Manchester United scout Eddie Coulter, who more recently discovered Jonny Evans. Rodgers’ appearances at schoolboy level for United – alongside a far superior compatriot and friend Adrian Doherty, whose premature death at 26 is one of football’s many stories of tragically unfulfilled promise – are relatively unknown. A congenital knee weakness meant he knew he would be no more than a journeyman, so Rodgers set a course through youth management at Reading before Jose Mourinho hired him at Chelsea.

Some say the years in junior football honed his emotional intelligence, as he inveigled his way into the affections of families whose sons he wanted to sign. It was also a period which developed his interest in improving and rehabilitating players, which has been fundamental to the last two years at Liverpool. The Manchester United boardroom is acutely aware – and impressed – with Rodgers’ recasting of Gerrard as a regista (deep-lying playmaker) this season and, though Mark Gower of Charlton Athletic is not exactly in the Gerrard mould, he, too, attests to Rodgers’ capacity to recast a player.

Gower was a failing Swansea winger – on a road to nowhere, years after Tottenham had let him go – when Rodgers’ arrival at the Liberty Stadium repositioned him at the base of the side’s midfield. Gower was shocked to hear Rodgers referring to Claude Makélélé’s equivalent switch from the wing, as a 26-year-old, in a press conference discussion of his own positional change. Gower, just like Gerrard, felt “a million dollars”. He never looked back.

Rodgers rescued others at Swansea, where they liked to say he would take on “birds with broken wings”. Few thought Wayne Routledge, another Tottenham reject, had much of a prayer. Rodgers restored him.

“He’s like a teacher,” said Liverpool’s Jon Flanagan. “You listen. If you take his advice on board and give everything, the opportunity will come. But every day, it has to be 100 per cent. You have to take it seriously.”

There has been serendipity about Flanagan’s emergence at Anfield this season because Rodgers would have loaned the defender out if he could only have found him a club. But the 21-year-old is testament to Rodgers’ disinclination to close his mind to a player. Jordan Henderson, whose degree of improvement has also surprised some of Roy Hodgson’s England scouting team, is another who Rodgers was willing to wait to be proved wrong about. Joe Allen, in whom he invested £15m, is also displaying signs of Liverpool class at last.

Waiting and hoping are not easy at Liverpool, a club of very great expectations, which has made Rodgers’ assiduous work on his relationship with supporters another sophisticated triumph. His casual reference at his first press conference to becoming the club’s second Northern Irish manager – as if the name of John McKenna, Liverpool’s first, should be assumed knowledge – was deft. His exhortation to the fans to lift their support levels for Wednesday’s match against Sunderland, which created scenes reminiscent of the 1980s glory nights, had echoes of his call to supporters to go dressed as Elvis to Swansea’s last game of their first Premier League campaign. He had stored away the fact that one commentator had suggested that “The King” was more likely to be seen on the Mumbles than Swansea survive that season. They duly broke the record for the highest number of Elvis impersonators standing in one place.

“We were brought up not with the silver spoon, but with the silver shovel,” Rodgers told that documentary of his upbringing as the eldest of five brothers in working-class Carnlough, and everyone laughed at the sound bite. But he has dug Liverpool into the position they occupy this weekend. Few titles would be more attributable to one man than this one, if Liverpool can hold out and take it.

Super-Rush

I'd have Sterling over Henderson and Hazard over both of them tbh.

gimli2112

Super-Rush wrote: »

I'd have Sterling over Henderson and Hazard over both of them tbh.

you've obviously never seen Henderson's girly goal dance

sh__93

I'll not quote it cause it's very long but great article Utopia.
One thing though, Honest John McKenna was a Monaghan man. He wasn't Northern Irish.

Granted, this was all before Ireland got independence so I suppose it was all the same back then.

NukaCola

Utopia Parkway wrote: »

Very revealing article on Rodgers in the UK Indo yesterday. Must read for any Pool fan.

"Iago Aspas, Aly Cissokho, Luis Alberto and Mamadou Sakho cost more than £37m between them"

Figures are wrong, probably due to us not actually signing Cissokho unless i missed something.

Agent Coulson

NukaCola wrote: »

"Iago Aspas, Aly Cissokho, Luis Alberto and Mamadou Sakho cost more than £37m between them"

Figures are wrong, probably due to us not actually signing Cissokho unless i missed something.

Loan fee but that wouldn't be anyway near £5 million that would add that up to £37 million.

Agueroooo

Utopia Parkway wrote: »

Very revealing article on Rodgers in the UK Indo yesterday. Must read for any Pool fan.

Excellent piece thanks for sharing.

8-10

Super-Rush wrote: »

I'd have Sterling over Henderson and Hazard over both of them tbh.

Hazard should win it really, only player who could run him close is Daniel Sturridge.

Would be pretty cool for Suarez to win POTY and Sturridge Young POTY but Hazard for me

Iused2likebusts

what age is young player of the year?

djPSB

Utopia Parkway wrote: »

Very revealing article on Rodgers in the UK Indo yesterday. Must read for any Pool fan.

Excellent article.

Turtyturd

Iused2likebusts wrote: »

what age is young player of the year?

23 I think.

8-10

Turtyturd wrote: »

23 I think.

At start of season. So Sturridge for instance just qualifies turning 24 last sept. I'm surprised people would vote Henderson or Sterling ahead of him but as I say it's Hazard's to lose.

Eight Ball

Suarez for player of the year and Hazard for young player of the year. Probably the easiest vote of all time on the award.

djPSB

Eight Ball wrote: »

Suarez for player of the year and Hazard for young player of the year. Probably the easiest vote of all time on the award.

Not much between Sturridge and Hazard.

Eight Ball

djPSB wrote: »

Not much between Sturridge and Hazard.

Didn't realise Sturridge was eligible if so yeah defo should be considered.

I'd pick Hazard over Sturridge. Not a massive amount in it though.

Sturridge or Sterling might benefit from a bit of English bias.

Speak Now

Tbh I couldn’t care less about individual awards. 3 points tomorrow please

mike65

Sterling on Footie Focus

googled eyes

Rumoured kit

The white is nice

xerces

googled eyes wrote: »

Rumoured kit

The white is nice

Yes, please. Looking to buy a new LFC jersey and that white one is ideal.

kfallon

googled eyes wrote: »

Rumoured kit

The white is nice

They are nice but I doubt Warrior would stick to the same design for all 3 jerseys given what we've had from them so far.

I thought it was red, yellow and grey (with red collar and sash) for the 3 kits next year?

DDC1990

googled eyes wrote: »

Rumoured kit

The white is nice

These are the kits AFAIK

EDIT: From what I can tell, those kits are Fan Art by Kitster (a guy who posts a lot on RAWK), but aren't based on anything except what he'd like to see.

michael999999

googled eyes wrote: »

Rumoured kit

The white is nice

The standard charter emblem is too big.

michael999999

michael999999 wrote: »

The standard charter emblem is too big.

It's massive!

michael999999

googled eyes wrote: »

Rumoured kit

The white is nice

The standard charter emblem is too big.

googled eyes

Damn!! popped up of FB from the JOE.ie crowd

The trim on the other one drives me mental. It doesn't match between any of the jerseys or outfield or the keepers jersey

Agent Coulson

Duiske

Jerry Seinfeld wrote: »

3 points tomorrow please

Liverpool first to break 70pt barrier, with City and Arsenal both back on 66pts. Would be a dream footballing weekend.

john why

This season is like a wet dream, , just don't want to wake up.

3-1 pool tomorrow should have enough to beat spurs

brevity

So....what's everyone's chocolate bar?

rob316

Have a feeling chelsea, city and liverpool will all draw this weekend

Charlie19

I likethe way we Rolooverd most teams this season.

Agent Coulson

rob316 wrote: »

Have a feeling chelsea, city and liverpool will all draw this weekend

I have a feeling if you're right Arsenal might get a draw as well

murpho999

Bloody hell, Chelsea losing!

Agent Coulson

So I'm hating the rain outside today

ShamoBuc

No way Palace will hold on.....

mike65

SHUT IT!!!!!!!!!!

Fowler87

Surely a Chelsea win now..

brevity

****s sake lads!

Agent Coulson

Fowler87 wrote: »

Surely Schurrle a Chelsea win now..

FYP

Agueroooo

Honestly gave yis learned anything in here?....


SUSSSSSHH THE FŮCK UP !!!

gimli2112

LuckyLloyd wrote: »

You have to want Utd to win. They are irrelevant to us now and it's just like cheering for any old midtable side against our rivals.

And if they lose we get to lol anyway so it's all good.

Lloyd used wind me up then the Utd thing happened
I thank all his posts now

niallo27

I think palace will hold on for least a draw.

Nuri Sahin

Chelsea will win. It's a cert. Banker. Sure thing. No question about it.

rob316

Must not get excited

BMMachine

if you had said to me at the start of the season that I'd be excited by the Crystal Palace - Chelsea match I would never have believed you