REALISM WROTE the script when Brendan Rodgers was welcomed as Liverpool’s new manager not with a clamour of exaggerated hopes but a murmur of rational expectations. Long-term ambitions have to be high for a club who once rolled through English and European football like an honours-gathering juggernaut but the immediate priority must be to avoid becoming stranded in a ditch of mediocrity. Steering away from it and on towards the game’s biggest prizes should, as Rodgers stressed at his inaugural press conference on Friday, be considered the work of several years.
The most that can fairly be asked of him in his first season or two are clear signs he is moving Liverpool purposefully in the right direction. Judgment of how he is coping with that demand will, of course, be based mainly on progress in the Premier League. He is bound to appreciate there was never anything remotely persuasive in the attempt of his predecessor, Kenny Dalglish, to argue that some success in knockout tournaments (penalty shootout winners over Cardiff City in the Carling Cup final, runners-up to Chelsea in the FA Cup final) could be regarded as a reassuring counterweight in the 2011-12 season to Liverpool’s dismal league record.
Having won only six times on their own Anfield turf, they laboured home in eighth position, 37 points behind the champions, Manchester City. They were 17 adrift of the fourth-place finish that would normally have brought qualification for the Champions League but was, to Tottenham Hotspur’s dismay, stripped of the bonus this year by Chelsea’s triumph in the great continental competition. Though what Chelsea did there was an example of tournament form compensating for shortcomings in the domestic league, where they ended their campaign in sixth place, that was because the European trophy they captured has both unrivalled status and massive financial implications.
Being so distant from qualification for the Champions League was the dominant and depressing theme of Liverpool’s season and striving to ensure such miseries aren’t repeated will be seen by Rodgers as his primary obligation. He is determined to add to his club’s total of 18 league titles but, since the most recent of them was gained in the old First Division back in 1990, he accepts that is a target he cannot expect to close on soon.
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However, if the process of building and honing his squad towards the standards required to compete seriously for national supremacy is likely to be gradual, neither he nor his American employers will feel that a prolonged, costly exile from the Champions League (it’s already into a third season) is a tolerable proposition. But that worry, too, may call for a demonstration of patience from everybody at Anfield. Proving superior in the coming season to at least four of the seven teams who finished above them in the league table last month is a feat the bookmakers certainly think is beyond Liverpool.
If you believe they will secure one of the Premier League’s top four places and thus qualify for the Champions League, you can back your opinion with Ladbrokes at 9-4 against. If you’re sure they won’t, there is scant temptation to support your view at 3-1 on. Any bold soul who wants to bet on them to win the title will find Ladbrokes offering 33-1, easily the longest price the firm has ever quoted against their chances. The previous best pre-season price was the 16-1 put up two years ago when Roy Hodgson was installed for his brief, ill-starred tenure as Liverpool’s manager.
All the calculations reflected in the current betting market are concerned with whether Rodgers can sprint into effective action on Merseyside but he has eloquently emphasised that he means to deliver a stayer’s performance. He is only 39 but has served a lengthy and intensive apprenticeship for the daunting job he is undertaking. When his career as a professional player was ended by knee trouble at 20, he launched himself into coaching and his talent for it has been developed by a voracious eagerness to learn about enlightened methods and advanced techniques. He has benefited notably from his strong connections with Spanish football and from his spell working under Jose Mourinho at Chelsea.
Two short and not particularly impressive periods of management at Watford and Reading (where he was sacked after losing 11 of 23 matches played) might have obscured his worth but instead it was vividly revealed after he joined Swansea in July 2010. The crisp-passing possession game that carried the Welsh club gracefully out of the Championship in 2011, via a playoff final defeat of Reading, retained its combination of entertainment value and productiveness in the Premier League and 11th place was the deserved reward. Rodgers was swamped with admiration and in the case of Liverpool, who had taken just one point from his prodigies, the praise turned into wooing.
Nothing does more to encourage the conviction that they have made a good appointment than the firmness and clarity with which Rodgers responded to their overtures, beginning with the insistence he would talk to them only as their declared choice, not as one of a series of candidates. Most significant of all was his flat refusal to work in conjunction with a director of football, which is too often a recipe for the dilution of a manager’s authority. He recognises that one individual cannot attend to every aspect of the running of a big club but favours the option of co-operating with a group of four or five specialist advisers to “form a little technical board” and “decide the way forward”. There’s the impression they won’t decide to do anything he doesn’t comprehensively approve, which is as it should be.
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Brendan Rodgers’s reputation is founded on his excellence as a coach but optimism about his future owes as much to his Northern Irish grit, self-belief and stubbornness of will.
Gerrard’s Euro 2012 claim wide of the mark
It will be a major upsetting of the odds if England’s footballers shine in the decisive stages of the Euro 2012 championship that is due to start in Poland and Ukraine towards the end of this week, and the epidemic of modesty afflicting the nation’s attitudes to their chances was fully warranted long before injuries excluded a couple of important players from the squad. But the justification for pessimism is past form in such events and a current shortage of truly outstanding talents rather than any inclination to accept an extraordinary assessment of the tournament’s challenges voiced the other day by Steven Gerrard.
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The England captain said: “It’s harder to win than the World Cup because the standard is even higher.” Then, neatly undermining the point he had just made, he referred to Greece’s triumph at the Euros in 2004 and Denmark’s in 1992. Gerrard was apparently making a slightly convoluted effort to plant morale-boosting thoughts in the minds of his troops, so the odd illogicality could be excused. And it wasn’t difficult to discern the origins of his bizarre claim. The Euros have only 16 competing countries, which ensures there are fewer absolute weaklings than can be identified among the field of 32 at the World Cup. As a consequence intensity can be expected to develop sooner at the Euros and there may be a heightened risk of an early exit (circumstances that will be drastically altered in 2016 when the number of contestants will be expanded to 24).
However, there’s no escaping the need to put the boot into the suggestion that it’s harder to be European champions than to be world champions. Brazil and Argentina haven’t been intimidatingly strong recently but it’s surely a tad early to be imagining that a tournament is rendered more demanding by their absence. Hasn’t Stevie G noticed that South American teams have won eight of the nine World Cup finals played outside Europe? And when did Greece or Denmark ever look like winning a World Cup? Of course, since 1966 it has scarcely mattered to England whether a championship was continental or global. They have been equal opportunity under-achievers.
Rory isn’t down and out
Having completed a demoralising hat-trick at Jack Nicklaus’s Memorial Tournament in Ohio by missing a third cut in succession just a dozen days before he is scheduled to play in the US Open golf championship he turned into a procession last year, Rory McIlroy seems about as ill-prepared for a title defence as a champion could be. But boxing’s the place to find title-holders who have really gone haywire. In October 1990, world heavyweight champion James “Buster” Douglas was such a blubbery leviathan as he came off the stool to meet Evander Holyfield that it struck me Evander would be wondering whether to throw punches or fire harpoons. Rory couldn’t be such a bad-looking loser.