Is Luis all that’s keeping Reds afloat?
“It will turn supporters away from football if they think players are conning their way to results,” the Everton manager warned.
This should be understood as something Moyes said to put pressure on the referee rather than something he actually believes. On yesterday’s form, the Uruguayan is the most compulsively watchable player in the league.
He gives the impression that he is capable of anything, in both the footballing and the moral dimensions. There’s not much more you can ask of any player. They are in the entertainment business after all. Even Moyes had to admit grudging amusement when Suarez celebrated Liverpool’s opening goal by flopping to the ground in front of the Everton dugout.
Liverpool supporters should enjoy Suarez while he’s still around, because it’s hard to see him remaining at Anfield beyond the end of this season. There are those who say his finishing is too erratic to count him as a really world-class forward. Suarez fans would retort that in many ways, nutmegs are better than goals, which contains a kernel of truth: forwards who can reliably beat their man one-on-one are the most precious commodity in football.
Yesterday he nearly won the match for a Liverpool side that were dominated from start to finish by an Everton team that will most probably finish above them in the Premier League. In a better team, Suarez could be devastating. A talent like his deserves to be in the Champions League, and Liverpool don’t have the quality to get there.
Brendan Rodgers talked yesterday about how proud he was of his team’s effort. They had lost a 2-0 lead, but as far as Rodgers was concerned, the important point was the ages of his players. “Raheem Sterling, 17,” he said. “Suso, 18. Andre Wisdom, 19. Jonjo Shelvey, 20 years old. Joe Allen, 21 [actually 22].”
Watching Rodgers go about his business in the fly on the wall documentary “Being: Liverpool“, he looks like a coach who has spent a lot of time working with young players. He is fond of gathering his players together to listen to inspirational speeches reminiscent of Bill Pullman’s US President in the movie Independence Day (“We will not go gentle into that good night, OK? We will rage, rage, every day of our lives, against the dying of the light. OK?” is an exaggeration, but not by much).
These speeches become slightly repetitive, and you are reminded of the animated storyline inserts in a video game that look good until you get bored of them and start clicking through. One of Rodgers’ favourite pearls of management wisdom is “Young players will run through a barbed wire fence for you. Older players will look for the hole in the fence.” Younger players are certainly more trusting and credulous. Perhaps they are more inclined to listen to inspirational speeches, but one wonders whether senior professionals really need to be motivated so relentlessly.
Managers like Rodgers and Andre Villas-Boas — who are trying to carve out top-level management careers despite not having played professionally — will always start at a disadvantage compared to former pros, and not just because they cannot command the mystical tribal reverence that is accorded the most beloved players.
There are many skills required of the modern football manager — tactical insight, transfer market knowledge, boardroom politicking, media relations — but at once the most basic and the most difficult is simply knowing how to act around a big group of footballers.
The old pro has 15 or 20 years experience in just such a group environment, and even the slowest and dullest of them cannot help but pick up some know-how by osmosis. It’s something you can’t learn at sports college and the practical experience gives them a priceless initial advantage. Rodgers can’t do anything about that, all he can do is learn on the job. He needs to learn faster. Liverpool have been presented as a club that is making progress: new coach, new players, new style of play — but as far as the league table is concerned, their decline continues. They have five fewer points than they did at the same stage last year. No player except Suarez has scored more than one goal in the league. For all the rhetoric of a bright new beginning, right now it looks uncomfortably as though Suarez is all that is keeping Liverpool afloat.
