Rodgers’ ramblings heighten Pool plight
Actually it was a roar of relief. Dropping points against this Liverpool side would have been embarrassing, and their team had come disconcertingly close to doing so.
“I’m very proud of the fight,” Brendan Rodgers said. “You come here, it’s always difficult. You see other teams sort of crumble...”
Actually this season you’ve seen a lot of teams take the game to Manchester United, figuring they have a better chance of scoring against Ferdinand, Evans, De Gea et al. than stopping van Persie scoring for 90 minutes. That’s why United have already conceded 29 league goals. To put that figure into perspective, it means that after only 22 games they have already let in more goals than in any of their title-winning seasons from 2007 to 2009.
It’s not a great United side but van Persie is a great player and here Ferguson showed off the range of attacking options at United’s disposal. Against Wigan on New Year’s Day he paired van Persie with the movement and lethal finishing of Hernandez. Against Liverpool Ferguson decided the relentless energy of Welbeck would be the best foil for van Persie against Liverpool’s slightly wooden centre-half pairing.
Martin Skrtel should have been sent off for jumping on Welbeck’s back after the United forward got in behind him. In previous editions of this fixture, Howard Webb had famously given some marginal decisions in Manchester United’s favour. Maybe Skrtel should text Ryan Babel to thank him for the card Webb produced this time being yellow rather than red.
Shinji Kagawa linked well with Cleverley and Carrick, and quite where Wayne Rooney now fits into United’s attacking unit is anyone’s guess. It was reported during the week that Rooney felt he would be fit enough to be in the squad for the Liverpool game. Ferguson evidently thought he needed to be even fitter than that.
“That’s 24 points we are behind Manchester United,” Brendan Rodgers said afterwards, with the air of a man poised to turn the tables with an inspirational reinterpretation of a bleak-looking situation. “But... we’re not 24 points behind on quality.”
Rodgers did not show his workings and quite what he meant by the statement is anyone’s guess. Although league points are at best a crude way of measuring quality, they’re better than all the other methods that have been tried.
When you come to a place like Old Trafford, Rodgers said: “You need two things. You need to have courage. And you need to have belief.”
Courage and belief are abstract nouns. They describe concepts or qualities that cannot be perceived with the senses. A consequence of that intangibility is that the words mean different things to different people.
Someone who has a clear idea of what they are talking about and wants to communicate that idea to a group is unlikely to use too many abstract nouns because doing so is a sure way of your message becoming lost.
On the other hand, someone who doesn’t have much to say can throw in as many abstract nouns as they can think of on the basis that they sound a bit like they know what they are talking about to somebody who is not listening very carefully. Think of Alan Hansen talking on Match of the Day: pace, power, pride, passion, spirit, hunger, desire, determination, etc.
That sort of thing is OK on Match of the Day, which sees it as part of its mission to cater to people who might not necessarily be football fans. One assumes serious professional footballers are a little more demanding of those who presume to instruct them on how they might do better. If so, Liverpool had better hope the stuff Rodgers says in press conferences, or was filmed saying to his players on Being: Liverpool, is strictly for public consumption.
Getting back to Rodgers’ substantive point about what you need at Old Trafford: why only two things? You could think of a few other things that might come in handy at Old Trafford. For instance, “your recent £12m signing on the pitch rather than on the bench”.
Rodgers said that he had been protecting Sturridge: “Obviously I’ve been assessing him in training. Sometimes you can rush them back too early, and you can break them.”
The glimpse of a nascent partnership between Sturridge and Suarez was one of the few promising aspects of the game for Liverpool, who are still without a league victory against any side in the top half of the table.
“We’ve been close in a number of games against the guys at the top end of the league. That’s the next step for us. That can start your journey again in a new direction,” Rodgers said, with a twinkle. Happy is the club where the mere prospect of one day winning a big match is almost as intoxicating as the real thing.
