Liverpool were practising defending corners last week when Mario Balotelli was horrified to be asked to drop into the penalty area and mark an opponent. It was an early test of the relationship and authority between the tempestuous striker and Brendan Rodgers, his Liverpool manager. “He said, ‘I don’t mark at corners,’ ” Rodgers said. “Ah, you do now. For the first time in his life, he marked at a corner. Treat him like an adult with responsibility . . .”
Rodgers’s sentence tailed off, possibly because a number of managers have said similar and been disappointed by the outcome. Early impressions were positive. Balotelli cleared one corner against Tottenham Hotspur yesterday, but the two more telling headers came at the other end and neither went in from close range. Hugo Lloris denied him and he glanced another wide at the back post. There was a clever back-heel to release Daniel Sturridge and a wild half-volley with Lloris stranded and the goal gaping.
Rodgers might hope that the hullaballoo surrounding Balotelli, 24, will end after his debut, when the striker emerged wearing one blue boot, the other pink. “Mario’s a good guy, a good man,” Rodgers said. “If you take away the circus that surrounds him, and the circus he probably invites himself sometimes, and control the background noise, and get him focused on his football, he’s a good fella. He’ll make mistakes, but today you saw him get his reward for a real good week’s work. You can see he’ll be a handful for defenders. He is at an age where he has got to show maturity.”
Balotelli inquired about being the club’s penalty-taker. Steven Gerrard scored a record-breaking 43rd spot-kick yesterday and will continue to assume the responsibility. After a stuttering victory over Southampton and defeat by Manchester City on Monday, Rodgers felt that this display resembled matches last season and praised Raheem Sterling for his dribble. “We played very well and clicked back into where we were last season,” he said. “I had to laugh when he almost scored the fourth. He dribbled through the Spurs defence like Ricky Villa, but his finish was more like Ricky Gervais.”
Tottenham could quibble about the game-changing moments either side of the interval when Nacer Chadli should have scored and Phil Dowd awarded a soft penalty, but their limitations were apparent. They played deep, scared of Liverpool’s blistering pace, and had no attacking player to stretch the opposition. Lloris and the defenders were jittery at the start and Christian Eriksen off the pace.
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Mauricio Pochettino, the head coach, suffered his first defeat after four consecutive victories. “Maybe the team felt some pressure from last season, after two defeats against Liverpool,” Pochettino said. “I am proud of the players because they tried. It’s not easy for them to believe and to try and play a different way, as we demand. This was unlucky, maybe, but in the key moments of the game we lost it. From my point of view, it was a pretty soft penalty.”