Liverpool have plenty room for improvement
Yesterday’s matches in the Premier League proved that as with many other management principles, the actual relationship between performance and result is at best approximate and at worst ironic.
Rodgers’ selection of Jonjo Shelvey to start in midfield with Steven Gerrard and Joe Allen was a withering statement of what the manager thinks of his midfield options. One wonders why Liverpool made such an effort to snatch Nuri Sahin from the clutches of Arsenal, if he can’t be preferred to Shelvey in a match like this.
As for the £20m Jordan Henderson, Shelvey being picked ahead of him was totally uncontroversial. Rodgers’ indifference to Henderson is a change from the unconditional love and support he appeared to enjoy under the Dalglish regime. Might as well try a change and see if it works.
As Alan Pardew said about Demba Ba: some players play better when they’re angry. Maybe a bit of embarrassment will be the spur he needs to start showing a bit of personality when he does get on the field.
Shelvey showed some nice pieces of close control but his passing was erratic and he was lucky to escape a booking for chopping down Rafael. Then he careened into Jonny Evans with the kind of studs-up tackle that suggests he may not be as smart as he looks. Who knows whether Shelvey was playing to the gallery when jabbing his finger at Alex Ferguson on his way off the pitch, but for his own sake you hope he realises the real fault lay closer to home.
His sending-off was a good example of why Giovanni Trapattoni doesn’t trust young players. More than any other factor, it cost his team the game.
Trapattoni would have been feeling rather shrewd if he had been watching the game. He could have told you in advance that a Liverpool team with five players aged 22 or under would eventually be outfoxed by a more experienced Manchester United, even if United didn’t turn up for the first-half.
Trap would never have picked a side like Rodgers did yesterday, and if Trap was managing Liverpool, they might not be second from bottom in the league today. And yet it is hard to see Trap lasting long in that job.
The thing that really counts for fans is not so much whether the team succeeds or fails, but whether it seems to be getting better or worse. This, more than any other reason, is why Roy Hodgson failed at Liverpool: his signings were stopgaps nearing the end of their careers, there was a bleak futurelessness to his regime. He saw himself as fighting a desperate rearguard action against institutional decline, and while that may have been largely accurate, it was no way to get anyone excited about his team. Sometimes a leader has to bend the truth.
Rodgers might not know how to get Liverpool back on their feet; it’s a big job and already some of his phrases are sounding a little shopworn.
Nobody needs to hear again about the differing ways that young players and experienced players tackle a barbed wire fence. But he clearly grasps that in the absence of real prospects of winning anything, the crowd will be satisfied with watching a new team take shape.
It will also be easier for people to believe in this new team if it includes the likes of Raheem Sterling and Shelvey rather than the kind of experienced pros a more conservative, results-driven manager would pick: the likes of Stewart Downing. A similar story unfolded at Manchester City, where Arsenal’s superior performance was not rewarded with a win. I watched City beat Arsenal 1-0 at the Etihad last season and there was a wild intensity to the atmosphere. This time around the crowd was diffident and some players played like they had barely bothered to get out of bed. But then last year, City were hungry for their first title in 45 years; now the dream is to hold what they have.
The direction the team is moving is important: an improving team of whatever level excites those who watch it, a team that has plateaued or is in decline bores them.
The good news for Brendan Rodgers is that Liverpool have plenty of room for improvement.
