Brendan Rodgers needs to make his Reds tricky again

It’s been a season of drastic ups and downs for Brendan Rodgers’ tricky Reds. After enduring the worst 3 months of Rodgers’ tenure in autumn 2014, we went on a 13-game unbeaten run in the league that only ended a week ago and reached the quarter finals of the FA Cup.

For a while in that unbeaten period, the Reds looked imperious. Though we still weren’t quite as threatening in front of goal as they were a year ago, we looked like we could beat anyone on our day. Unfortunately, that “day” has looked in danger of fading away for some time now.

Against Blackburn we looked off the pace. At the time, we figured it was one game too many; the games had been coming thick and fast for weeks and some players looked tired. At Swansea we figured the week off would have given the squad time to recover and prepare for the trip to Wales, but we produced a similar level of performance and were fortunate not to be 3 goals down at half time.

It was almost as if that without the midweek game to keep our momentum going, we’d been allowed to take our foot off the gas and become rusty. It didn’t help that Garry Monk had come up with a way to combat our 3-4-3 system by playing a diamond in midfield and overwhelm Henderson and Allen. Fortunately Rodgers was able to bring on Gerrard and push Henderson further up the pitch, and we improved.

Man United used the same tactic. We didn’t start well, and they dominated us for almost all of the first half. Though we’d already seen teams try to dominate us in midfield at Swansea, United had better players with which to hurt us. Rodgers must have known that Van Gaal would do this; that he would ask Fellaini to sit on Joe Allen the entire match, that his forwards would press the living hell out of our defence and midfielders, but still he didn’t change anything. He took the same approach he used at Swansea, except this time when he asked Gerrard to come on and change the tide of the game, he got himself red-carded.

With three games in a row of unconvincing performances, it’s become a worry.

One of Brendan Rodgers’ greatest strengths is his ability to make changes during the game that will ensure his side comes out on top after a rough start, whether it be good substitutions or a tweak to the formation. However, bearing in mind recent performances, he needs to start getting things right from the start.

It’s great that he knows what to do to save a game that’s slipping through his fingers, but at some point he needs to master how to get it right from the beginning again. As we saw against United, eventually there will come a time when the team will face such an uphill battle to come out to change things around that they’ll be unable to recover.

We know that Rodgers is capable of this. Last season, one of the main reasons we won so many games is because we always came racing out the gates and often scored at least once inside the first 20 minutes. Brendan has done very well to get us where we are now considering all that’s happened, but his next test is to find a way to unlock that secret.

Once he does, we’ll be in a much better state in the race for fourth.