Gerrard: “We Will Get Top Four”

LIVERPOOL captain Steven Gerrard expects a more assertive approach from the side this season and has stated his belief that Liverpool Football Club will finish in the top four at the end of the upcoming campaign; thereby claiming a Champions League spot for the following year.

Gerrard only arrived in Boston on Monday with the rest of Liverpool’s Euro 2012 England contingent however, having seen Brendan Rodgers work at close quarters since then, the midfielder has been impressed with the new boss and is confident about the future.

Speaking to the Liverpool Echo Gerrard said:

“I think we’ll definitely see a much bolder Liverpool team this season and more exciting too. But with a quick transition to ensure we’re organised when we lose the ball.”

Gerrard is entering his fifteenth season as part of the Liverpool first team and, as such, is better positioned than anyone to perhaps explain why previous regimes have failed to deliver the requisite success back to Anfield, and how Rodgers may be able to do things differently.

“I think over the years, sometimes Liverpool have come up against certain types of opposition and we have shown them too much respect. But maybe we have had to because of the style we’ve been asked to play.

“There were times under previous managers when we did that, but I think this manager is the opposite, he wants us to play like a big team.

“There’s a lot of hard work and a lot of learning to be done sharpish if we want to implement that straight away. In only my second training session here we were doing team shape and Brendan was telling players what he expects them to do movement wise, how he wants the team to do the transition when we lose the ball to win it back.”

Liverpool slumped to an eighth place finish in the Premier League last year, the club’s worst finish since 1994, and Gerrard is all too aware that things must improve. However, the skipper is confident that this season will prove much better for the Reds and he made clear is belief that a top four finish is well within the club’s reach.

“I don’t think a team has ever gone from eighth to first in one season but there are still other big targets for us to achieve – getting back into the top four is certainly the priority,” he continued.
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“I think we will get in the top four. I am confident we will get it. If we can play like we did in a lot of games last season, be clinical and take our chances, I think we will be high up in the table.

“The idea is to improve and have some fun along the way in the cup competitions like we did last year. It was difficult to make sense of it at times. There were times you would come off thinking ‘no wonder we are sixth, seventh or eighth in the league’ as we hadn’t played well enough.

“But there were times when we murdered teams. We hadn’t come off with what we deserved. It was frustrating but if you look at the season as a whole, you can’t make excuses for finishing eighth. It wasn’t good enough.

“We are Liverpool, we can’t finish eighth. We have got to take the criticism for under-performing last year and put it right. We can’t be doing post-match interviews saying ‘we should have got the points or we were not clinical enough’. We have got to be clinical. We have got to get the points we should get.”

As he went on, Gerrard issued a rallying cry to his Liverpool team-mates to use the frustration and disappointment of last season’s league campaign as fire to fuel their assault this term, before explaining how Rodgers has managed to make such an impression on him in such a short space of time.

“The players have got to think how I think and use the hurt of what happened to make up for last year. That is the only way you can do it.

“I can’t speak for anyone else but if they ask for my opinion I would tell them to be patient. Obviously I am biased but I think playing Champions League football for this club would be more special than anywhere else. If we work hard enough and perform well enough it will come.

“The manager has been in touch with me from since he came in. I’ve had a lot of banter with text messages and quite a few calls throughout the Euros. He has made me aware of where he’s at and what he’s trying to do.

“Every time you speak to him you can’t help but be impressed. He gives you a lift. His man-management skills are fantastic and if he can do that with all the players around the squad then it can be really good for the club.

“I’ve only seen him on the training ground for a few days, but as a guy how he’s dealt with me on a personal level has been exceptional. I know the players who have worked with him over the past few weeks have been impressed.”

You can catch Neil on Twitter @Neil1980 or on his blog http://itsallinthegameblog.wordpress.com/
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