Tony Barrett sounds a wee bit peeved:
Tony Barrett
Published at 12:01AM, November 10 2012
“Judge me after ten games.” With those words, Roy Hodgson damned himself to an unflattering appraisal of his opening months as Liverpool manager, from which he never recovered.
Brendan Rodgers never committed himself to such an early assessment and his refusal to do so appears particularly shrewd in the wake of his record being marginally worse than Hodgson’s over a similar period.
In the ten Barclays Premier League games that Liverpool have played this season, they have won only two, giving them one point fewer than Hodgson achieved in 2010-11.
By that stage of his Liverpool career, the England manager had already fallen foul of the Kop. It is the treatment of Hodgson that makes the emphatic support that Rodgers continues to receive all the more striking.
Rodgers recognises that the time is rapidly approaching when he will be judged on results rather than potential or possession. “This is the business we are in,” he said. “The performance levels have been good and we have to keep moving forward.
“I have got so much respect for the supporters because it must be frustrating for them, considering what they have had in the past at this club and where we are at. But I also believe we cannot keep everything in our rear-view mirror.”
The feeling persists that Rodgers is the first Liverpool manager of the modern era to benefit from the lowering of expectations. Rafael Benítez and all who preceded him post-Bill Shankly were expected to win the Premier League; Hodgson and Kenny Dalglish were expected to guide them into the top four. Rodgers? He has merely been tasked with improving on the eighth-place finish of last season by Fenway Sports Group, the owner, which has made it clear that cup football should not distract him from that challenge.
Another key difference from Hodgson’s ill-fated tenure lies in the style of football that Rodgers wants Liverpool to play, in keeping with the club’s pass-and-move traditions.
More than anything else, it was Hodgson’s rudimentary approach that lost him support, but, given Rodgers’s fundamental commitment to possession, there is no chance of him going down the same road.
The likelihood is, though, that the time for a more critical judgment of Rodgers is approaching. Already there have been murmurings among former players and managers of a lack of variety in Liverpool’s play and the need for the club to return to the pragmatism that laid the platform for their glory years.
One former player used an anecdote to illustrate that it never mattered how Liverpool won, so long as they did. Everton and Manchester United played friendly matches against Tranmere Rovers in the early Eighties to help to raise funds for the cash-strapped Merseyside club. Both tried to play a passing game on a mudbath of a pitch at Prenton Park and lost.
By contrast, Graeme Souness, the Liverpool captain, took one look at the state of the playing surface and ordered his team-mates to play it long instead. Liverpool’s possession statistics plummeted, but they won 3-1. It is that kind of streetwise pragmatism that Liverpool have lacked more than anything under Rodgers.
Tomorrow, Chelsea will become Rodgers’s eleventh league opponents, against whom Hodgson reached the same landmark. Even under a manager who was not long for the job, Liverpool managed to win — albeit at Anfield.
A repeat of that result would be the most positive indication that future statistical comparisons with Hodgson will be more flattering to Rodgers.
