When Is It Fair To Begin To Judge Rodgers’ Liverpool?

Football is full to the brim with cliches, but when it comes to management none stick out more than, “you can only judge him after ten games.” But is it that easy to purely disregard Rodgers’ past eight competitive games, albeit only half were in the league, and excuse it with “we can only judge after ten”?

The other half have thus been in the Europa League, where we have played a mixture of players against, in one instance, a pretty non-existent opposition and although Hearts would be arguably a mid-table side in the Premiership, our line up made being up primarily of squad players, especially the first leg, renders it hard to analyze.

Therefore we are a long way off the ‘ten’ which is the benchmark to begin such analyses, but I’d like to look at the early signs and ask whether we should have to wait for ten games when we’ve had the worst start to a season for a hundred years.

I totally accept the idea that Rodger’s philosophy will take time to bed into the players and ultimately bear fruit; some of his ideas we are already seeing evidence for, albeit not the way we wanted, as in Skrtel’s back pass costing us a win against the champions.

The ball retainment mantra has however been obvious, but we are still faced with last season’s problem in that we cannot end a move with a goal. It’s all well and good being able to cut open a defence expertly, but when you cannot put the ball in the back of the net it’s all wasted.

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Our failure to pinch a ‘goalscorer’ in the transfer window could be a costly one, but the blame for that is debatable, thus easing our early judgment on Rodgers, but does it ease it a lot?

Out of our four opening games, there is only one where we can outright take positives and that was the game against the champions. We were undone by an individual mistake, but apart from that we didn’t give the City players a moments rest in what Yaya Toure described as ‘one of his hardest games in English Football’.

But in the other three, especially away at West Brom and at home to Arsenal, we have been arguably woeful, with mistake after mistake costing us; whether it be misplaced passes or defensive lapses, we have been punished.  Against Sunderland, we had a total of twenty shots and hit the frame of the goal twice, painfully highlighting again our failure in the transfer window.

As I mentioned earlier, it is hard to hold Rodger’s solely accountable for our poor finishing, and it could be arguably unfair to do the same with our catalogue of defensive errors. Yes, he is there to organize and drill a team so they do not occur, but he surely cannot be accountable for such schoolboy errors like wayward passes.

Although we can already begin to see the Rodgers’ template being installed, I feel that he can only do so much and that our poor start to the season is not reflective of our manager. It could however be argued that his philosophy has led to some of our errors, most obviously Skrtel’s, but in general our insistence on passing our way out of trouble has the potential for disaster until it becomes natural to the players.

With that mistakes will become infrequent, leaving us with our major problem being at the top end of the pitch; a problem that I feel we cannot hold Rodgers responsible for entirely, for now anyway.

To conclude then, albeit fans are fickle and expect instant success, our record of recent managers in only a few years means that is something that could never be expected, leaving us with no choice but to reserve judgment for now. Looks like there was something in the cliche after all.