Brendan Rodgers Also Coming of Age

In the past 2 weeks Liverpool have had 2 huge games, against Everton and Arsenal, sandwiching a ‘should win’ game against West Brom.

The unusual thing about these two fixtures though, was that Liverpool came through the two huge games with 9 goals for and 1 against.  The meat in the sandwich, the match against West Brom, ended 1-1 and saw Liverpool drop 2 almost certain points, in a kind of game that Liverpool have normally hammered the opposition in this season.

Seeing Liverpool destroy Everton and then obliterate Arsenal were truly sights to behold, and while the West Brom result was a massive disappointment – and could prove costly at the end of the season – the nature of the wins against Everton and Arsenal, and the manner in which Liverpool came through those games shows that not only are Liverpool’s young players maturing, but manager Brendan Rodgers is also coming of age.

The game against Everton showed that Rodgers is able to adapt his tactics and game plan to counteract a manager that employs a very similar style to his own.  Everton have been highly impressive this season (promise, that’s the first and only time I’ll write those words!) and the game at Goodison saw Everton almost beat us at our own game, with only Daniel Sturridge and Luis Suarez able to save us certain embarrassment.

Barely 3 months later and Brendan Rodgers has shown that he learned from his selection and tactical errors and Everton were quite vigorously put to the sword.  On the other hand, Roberto Martinez showed that he had little in the way of a plan B, which over the past couple of games has proven to be to the detriment of our Merseyside rivals.

The Arsenal result proved to be much more of a serious eye-opener though, as Rodgers didn’t just out-think and out-tactic (thanks for that, Big Sam) a world class and highly experienced manager, 20 years his senior, he made a mockery of his team that for much of this season have sat comfortably top of the league.

Much of the discussion following Saturday morning’s game was of the first 20 minutes which saw the Reds storm into an unassailable 4-0 lead at Anfield but that does a huge in-justice to the work Rodgers clearly did on the training ground with his players and the background he and his team did in order to pen Arsenal back for over 65 minutes and then contain them for the remainder of the game.

Arsene Wenger’s typically ungracious response following the game was to accuse his players of not turning up and claim that he could’ve substituted all of them at half-time, given how poorly they played.

The obvious response in a game like this, where the over-whelming favourites are comfortably and embarrassingly beaten is to claim they played poorly, rather than give any real credit to their victorious opposition.

Turn the tables, and see Arsenal destroy Liverpool in such a manner and the press would be falling over themselves to invent new superlatives to lavish on Arsene Wenger’s conquering heroes.

Liverpool’s players deserve full credit for carrying out Rodger’s commands in both games, as they clearly applied them to the letter but the manager himself deserves a lot of credit for showing that he can nudge and tweak his game-plan to suit similar opposition and that he is capable of adapting his tactics to completely out-think and out-fox a manager who has had more years in management than Rodgers has had in football.

He, like his team, are far from the finished article but his maturity is beginning to show, particularly in the way he has started to downplay Liverpool’s title challenge and if he can continue to perform – and get his team to perform – in the manner it did on Saturday then there is no doubt that Liverpool will have many more games like this before the season ends and we, as fans, can look forward to many more thrilling and successful seasons to come.