It’s a good job Brendan Rodgers reads twitter.
Wednesday’s Champions League match against Bulgarian champions, Ludogorets Razgrad, was the first in the competition for Liverpool since Fiorentina won 2-1 at Anfield in 9th December 2009. That defeat did a lot to hammer nails into a Benitez-shaped coffin which had been carefully constructed in Texas for the previous few years.
It was always going to be a nervous occasion for a club whose supporters are simply desperate for more success. Social media, especially twitter, is full of amateur coaches adept at mastering FIFA and Football Manager and they’re never short of knowing what the magic bullet is that would alter the course of the match they’re watching in an instant. One of the problems with these part-time geniuses is that they rarely see things from the opponent’s point of view.
“Oh it’s so-and-so’s fault as he should’ve been in this position, or he should’ve done that and if he had we’d have won”
But of course this ignores how your opponents may also adjust to your change of tactic. There are times when you have to look at who you have been playing and agree they have played better, wanted it more, or just had the rub of the green. Simply following a match on twitter leaves you with a feeling so few people seem to enjoy football these days. It appears to be a trauma almost too hard to witness for some, you’re often wondering why they bothered.
At half-time, on Wednesday, a number of people were commenting on how Rodgers needed to change things by getting Balotelli to push further forward. Hey presto, in the second half the Italian spends more time in the penalty area and then gets the opening goal. Throughout most matches these days, a wealth of suggestions and demands flow from the touchpads of phones, ipads and various other devices, as to how various managers could improve things for the watching public. Few of the ideas ever come to fruition and those which do often don’t work anyway. Maybe it’s been the advent of Football Manager which has so many trying to out-tactic the tacticians, but people seem incapable of simply watching a game for the enjoyment. Having said all that, no one has a right to tell you how you should watch a game but with twitter recording some peoples every thought, it can often infringe on many others thought processes. What this does have the ability to achieve is whip people up into a frenzy of nerves and worry.
The one thing I have noticed is how there’s little patience with today’s supporters. This remains a mystery for me as, the Premier League especially, is full of last minute goals. So many goals in English football come in the final 10 minutes of a match. Down the years there are numerous examples of a team turning a game around in the final knockings of a game. Yet after 20 minutes if a team hasn’t scored there are supporters who believe “that’s it, we’ve lost this now”.
Team sports can be so much about trends and balance of power, almost similar to a tug-of-war. For me, this is one of the most fascinating aspects for which individual sports fail to replicate. It’s all very well one of two members of the side having the belief they can alter the course of a match, but if you have other members who do not share that belief it can be difficult to get the sum of the whole team to overturn opponents. This seems to generate the common explanation from players for failing to win as “they were difficult to break down”.
One observation I would make about watching football for the past 40 years is that there is a definite trait in successful teams seeming to have luck on their side. During the 1970’s and 1980’s we were known as ‘Lucky Liverpool’ mainly down to our propensity to score late goals and win matches we seemed to have no right to. For the Premier League supporter this trait was handed over to Manchester United who seemed to spend countless seasons winning games by a single goal when they were outplayed by the opposition. During these periods of dominance you could almost hear the trembling and racing hearts of the opposing fans when the game reached the time-added on period and you just hear that voice inside your head say “they’re gonna score now aren’t they. They’re so lucky?”
With that in mind it always surprises me when some fans give up so early in a game, and also so early in a season. As we have league tables produced after just one game so often fans will believe they can predict the future, relying on past performance as a guide. But Liverpool fans cannot surely forget how many believed they knew how last season was going to go when we struggled to beat Stoke, Aston Villa and Notts County yet fast forward four to five months and we were playing some of the best football in the country. This is also a club which famously won a Champions League trophy having been 0-3 down at half-time.
Supporting Liverpool can be a curious occupation. There are those like me who are privileged to have seen some of the finest talent viewed in England, play in red shirts with a Liverbird prominent proudly on their chest. Then there is a generation born too late to have seen these greats other than on youtube videos, and having to feed from a menu of one memorable Champions League success, various FA Cup and League Cups and a UEFA Cup win. If you’re under 30 you may struggle to remember our last League title when Kenny Dalglish dragged his side, still smarting from being robbed of the title the season before, to win a record 18th League Championship.
To say we’re desperate to be Champions again is a severe understatement. In some ways having the cup success during our ‘lean years’ has been a tease to keep us all on tenterhooks. Yet these ‘lean years’ has seen the club win more silverware than other clubs who are supposed to be in the prime of their life. Winning trophies is what the club is all about, and this has been the case since Bill Shankly turned the club round from a crumbling, slumbering giant languishing at the wrong end of the Second Division at Christmas 1959.
The danger of the paucity of patience and its replacement of nervy, worrying, fretism is that very little of it is positive. You see, not only have football fans changed over the years but so too have the players and therefore the managers have, as a consequence. Managers just have pick & choose who to rip a strip off and who to put an arm around the shoulder. Yet supporters can just vent their anger and frustration at anyone wearing their team’s shirt. It can’t be easy to feel you’re trying your best on a given day and maybe it just isn’t working, or maybe you’re doing your part of the teamwork but others are letting you down, and then you hear a torrent of abuse from people who haven’t been prepared to put up with the sacrifices you have.
Management and coaching these days is so much about positivity and belief yet the watching supporter seems to have moved the other way. Of course it’s far easier to be bitter, to snipe to expect the worst, but then that is why we sit on the sidelines, in the stands, in our sitting rooms, whilst those who have been lucky enough to have made it big, bust their bits off for our enjoyment.
There’s nothing to be gained from negativity, nothing was ever achieved through thoughts of “it cannot be done”, “you won’t be able to do that”, “you’re going to fail”. It brings about an opinion I had from a few years ago. Whose job is it to start the atmosphere in a stadium, the players or the crowd? There are more in the stands than on the pitch so how about trying to stimulate the players by creating an atmosphere where they believe they cannot fail? This was something which stood out to me during Kenny Dalglish’s 2nd period in charge at Liverpool.
My belief is that the supporters were so desperate for the team to be successful, especially with Kenny back in charge and after what they’d been through with Hicks, Gillett & Hodgson, that they soon became nervy and tense if the home side hadn’t scored after about twenty minutes. This tension translated to the players on the pitch and the result was they froze at crucial moments or perhaps tried too hard when all they needed to do was let their talent get them through.
This is the third year under Brendan Rodgers and in the previous two Liverpool have started slowly, not really hitting their form until the second half of the season. The advantage of this is the ability to put together the sort of run we did last season. I have no way of knowing this but it would seem like Rodgers works on the fitness of players more in the early part of a season and by halfway the players have got to grips with the tactics and are fully able to endure the rigours of a league season. To find out whether this works or not you only need to look at Manchester United under Alex Ferguson. If they lost matches during a season it was often in September or October, yet rarely after Christmas.
You don’t win titles in September and during a 38-game season there is plenty of time for clubs to put together winning runs or find they alarmingly lose form. Just think back to Manchester City’s title win in 2011-12. They were far and away the best side in the league during the opening months and it looked at one point as if they’d walk the league, but things can change, pressure can tell and also luck and fitness play a part.
Lots can change during a season and one of the addictive aspects to the Premier League is its ability to throw up shocks. Unlike nearly every other league in Europe, the Premier League has clubs who, on their day, can beat any other. All it needs is a little patience and who knows, you might just enjoy it a little more.