Patience Is The Key

“Patience is the key.”

It’s an old adage in football, and it can relate to several different things. The manager’s position, a youngster making his entrance to the first team, persevering with an out of form player. All these can be under the umbrella of patience.

However, Liverpool need to learn a new form of patience – in the final third.

We are undergoing our biggest footballing transformation since Rafa Benitez came in as manager in the summer of 2004. Hodgson brought his own unique brand of dullness to the squad following Benitez’ departure, and the Spaniard’s tactics had grown stale by the time he moved on. Dalglish took the same squad of players that Hodgson had and turned them into a team that tried to play good football. He then bought poorly in 2011.

But Brendon Rodgers is the biggest injection of “different” we have had for some while, tactically as well as philosophically. Benitez evolved us into the era of 4-2-3-1 (which is my favourite formation and has had a massive influx of usage since, and now seems en vogue at international level) and Rodgers is now taking us to 4-3-3. That of course is not a new formation; Mourinho used it extensively at Chelsea with great success. It is though new to us.

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But it’s not just numbers scribbled down on a chalkboard that are different, it’s the whole mentality. It’s about keeping the ball at all costs, and that is something that we have yet to adjust to. Case in point would be Carlos Tevez’ late equaliser for Manchester City a few weeks ago – instead of launching the ball down the line or into touch, Skrtel looked for the back pass which was picked off as it was pretty obvious it was coming.

Our whole formation is based around not giving the ball away cheaply. It’s not exactly an unrealistic aim. Reina is having massive goalkeeping issues at the moment but his distribution is good. All of the back four are good footballers. Joe Allen keeps it simple and rarely gives the ball away, Lucas is all about simple passes. But further up the pitch we struggle a bit, and it’s the two main men who are concerning me the most.

Gerrard and Suarez are losing possession far too easily. They are instinctive players and they will try and make the most attacking pass possible. They are not safe or shy players, they have a certain X Factor about them and will try the spectacular. But they will give the ball away more as a result. I get the feeling that Rodgers is of the school of thought that we shouldn’t look to score with every attack. I think it infuriates him to see us give the ball away in a promising position because we try and hit the crucial ball when the crucial ball isn’t on. I think he’d rather us take a sideward or backward step and keep on probing. That’s what I expect to see, there’ll be a few sighs in the ground but we’ll start again with our attacks to ensure we keep the ball.

That’s going to be difficult for Gerrard and Suarez to adapt to, but I think they will in time. Gerrard’s game is changing as he loses his pace and the ability to get in behind defences as age and injuries begin to catch up with him. Suarez will need to cut out the little flicks if he is to remain as the main man up front through the middle of three and work hard on retaining possession. He is more than good enough to adapt to this.

The whole mentality of the club has been changed, Rodgers spoke at length about it in a recent press conference he had with fans, and it’s going to take time to adapt. We need to be patient. Teams are going to try and press us in an attempt to make mistakes and give the ball away. It is going to take time for the players to adjust to “keep the ball at all costs” but if we stick to our principles, keep it up and don’t panic when we don’t get an early goal then patience will pay off.