Brendan Rodgers Is Undoing All His Good Work at Liverpool

If the Premier League truly is the most entertaining league in Europe, Anfield was its centre-stage last season. Liverpool came to embody a momentous and erratic Premier League season, forcing themselves into title reckoning through sheer attacking will.

And yet just a matter of months later, Anfield is an altogether more somber place. If last season saw the funfair roll into town, Liverpool have been left picking up toffee apple sticks and popping balloons, whistling wistfully into the wind.

The Reds came within three points of winning their first league title in a generation last May but now stand no chance of building on that challenge this season. Liverpool have so far endured a dismal season, and what’s more, manager Brendan Rodgers is undoing all his good work.

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Liverpool have been afforded a certain degree of tolerance following the sale of Luis Suarez to Barcelona during the summer. Any team would have found it difficult to adapt to life without such an exceptional player, so Liverpool’s early-season struggles were hardly surprising.

But Rodgers has been afforded enough patience. Eleven games into the new Premier League season, and Liverpool have shown no signs of progression. In fact, the point could be made that they are actually getting worse as the campaign wears on.

Liverpool have lost three of their last four Premier League games, drawing the other one at home to Hull City, while also struggling in their Champions League group, where they have also lost three out of four fixtures.

However, it’s not just the results that are providing cause for concern at Anfield this season. For anyone who has watched Liverpool this term, their struggle has been a qualitative one, too.

Identity and philosophy have always been Rodgers’ greatest strengths as a football coach. Even when things weren’t going so well over the course of his first few months as manager at Anfield, there were still signs of what he wanted to achieve at Liverpool.

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The results might not have been there necessarily, but there was a style to Liverpool’s play. That is no longer the case. Without Suarez in the side, Rodgers’ thinking in how to compensate for the striker’s loss has been muddled, to say the least.

Are Liverpool a counter-attacking side? Not with Mario Balotelli in the team. Are they a passing side, in the style of a Barcelona? Not when their midfield unit is being overrun in nearly every game they play. And they’re certainly not a defensive team, given their track record this season.

Such contradiction in Liverpool’s identity as a team is reflected in the club’s transfer strategy over the summer. Of the nine players to arrive at Anfield ahead of the new season, only Alberto Moreno looks suited to Rodgers’ dynamic, free-flowing style of play, and even he has not been without his struggles.

But nobody embodies Liverpool’s transfer market disarray like Balotelli, who has become the public front of the club’s struggles on the pitch this season.

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It’s not that Balotelli is a bad player, as such. Even if his mindset can be questioned, his innate talent cannot. But the Italian simply is not a good fit with this Liverpool team.

While Suarez would run the channels and generally provide a hub of attacking intent along the front line, Balotelli is more of a static focal point. When he receives the ball, he is more likely to take a touch and ignore the runners around him, slowing down Liverpool’s attacking play.

That approach might work for teams reliant on a moment of inspiration from football’s most notorious wild child, but for Liverpool, he doesn’t play to their identity as a side. Or what was their identity as a side.

The injury sustained to Daniel Sturridge has also hit Liverpool hard, but can Rodgers really count on a single player—particularly one with such fitness issues—to turn things around?

The time for tolerance has passed at Anfield. The loss of Suarez can no longer be taken as an all-encompassing excuse for Liverpool’s dreadful form this season.