Brendan Rodgers has discovered this season how quickly management fortunes can change.
A little over six months ago, the Liverpool boss was named Manager of the Year after almost leading his team to their first title for 24 years.
This season has been a different story with his side crashing out of the Champions League at the group stages and struggling in the League. A couple of weeks ago, he was even favourite to be the first Premier League manager to be sacked.
He recognises that Liverpool have been a shadow of the side they were in the spring, but he points to the losses of Luis Suarez and Daniel Sturridge as the principal reason. Between them, those two players scored 52 of the side’s 101 League goals in the last campaign and set the tempo that the others followed. Now Suarez is at Barcelona and Sturridge has not played since August 31 because of a succession of muscle injuries.
Rodgers compares Liverpool’s plight to that of Borussia Dortmund, who are faring even worse in the Bundesliga as losing their best players to Bayern Munich starts to catch up with them.
However, as the Reds prepare to host Arsenal at Anfied this afternoon, Rodgers can see a few shoots of recovery as he senses some of the summer arrivals are beginning to settle.
“We are coming to terms with working in a different way,” he says. “I’ve had to look at different solutions, different personnel and different areas to see if we can recapture our model of play.
“We’ve put in some good performances without getting results but we’re seeing players start to slowly improve, like Lazar Markovic.
“We are going to improve and develop over the coming games. It’s fair to say that we haven’t been as dynamic as we have been over the last couple of years. But there are simple reasons for that, which should be clear.
“Look at Jurgen Klopp at Dortmund since he took Robert Lewandowski, a world class player, out of his team.
“I don’t care what team you are, if you lose two world class players, as we have, it is a massive, massive loss.
“It has taken us a bit of time to try to recover our way of working, to find the balance to produce those types of performances and results.”
Rodgers’ recent travails mean he is well able to sympathise with Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger. The Frenchman has come under increasing pressure from Gunners fans in the last month after 18 years in charge and the Liverpool boss finds it totally unacceptable.
“Arsene Wenger has been an iconic figure for football,” he says. “Some of the personal stuff he takes is disgraceful.
“As a leading figure and a real statesman of the game, it is really poor. But that is the modern world, unfortunately. Six or seven months ago, I was manager of the year and I was going to be this and that.
“Then because we lost two world-class players, one out of the club and one injured, I am useless. But I accept that.”
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