Brendan Rodgers has criticised the Arsenal fans who took a banner to the recent game at West Bromwich demanding Arsène Wenger’s resignation, claiming that such a key figure in football in this country deserves more respect. “Wenger has been amazing, for Arsenal and for football in general,” the Liverpool manager said.
“As a manager you get criticised when you don’t win games but some of the personal stuff he gets is disgraceful. He fell over in a train station and people were filming it and printing it, but that’s the modern world, unfortunately. What happened at West Brom the other week was really poor. He is a leading figure in football, a real statesman of the game.”
Liverpool fans have been patient through the side’s ups and down this season and rarely turn on their own managers in any case, but Rodgers does not see himself as above criticism, neither is he impervious to it. “I know how it goes,” he said. “Six or seven months ago I was the manager of the year and I was going to be this and that, tactically this and tactically that, and now, because we have lost two world-class players, I am useless. But I accept that. I must have just dreamt that about Liverpool playing 3-4-3 in the last game [the Capital One Cup victory at Bournemouth]. What do people think that was, a bit of luck? A British coach playing 3-4-3? A foreign coach doing that would be a tactical genius. I imagine people think I fell into that system through a stroke of luck or something.
“Not that I might have been awake into the early hours of the morning thinking of a solution to our problem. We played with a box midfield and a back three, with [Lazar] Markovic wide and [Raheem] Sterling as a free No9, but it took some thought. I didn’t just throw them out there.”
Alert readers might detect a certain testiness in Rodgers’ tone going into Sunday’s game against Arsenal. The midweek cup win banished some of the gloom that was beginning to surround Anfield after their Champions League exit, not that the opportunity to play Chelsea over two legs in the Capital One Cup can adequately compensate for such a disappointing showing in Europe.
But Rodgers is aware that the visit of Wenger and his team will invite direct comparisons with the corresponding fixture last season. Back in February, although Arsenal came to Merseyside as league leaders, they were almost frightened off the pitch by a Liverpool performance so irresistible that title talk began in earnest even though the home side were only fourth in the table. Four goals up after 20 minutes, even the eventual 5-1 scoreline barely reflected Liverpool’s superiority, or the fact that Arsenal had retreated into their own half before the interval, wary of crossing the halfway line for fear of leaving themselves open to another lightning strike.
That game was perhaps the apogee of Liverpool’s remarkable resurgence last season, with Luis Suárez and Daniel Sturridge at the peak of their powers and Sterling and Philippe Coutinho constantly creating danger. Largely through the absence of the first two Liverpool have been nothing like as effective this season, though Rodgers was encouraged by what he saw at Dean Court in midweek.
“If you look at the speed in our game the other night, the tempo and intensity of our pressing and work, it was much closer to what we had last season.” he said. “People have been looking at us and seeing we haven’t been as dynamic, but there are simple reasons for that. We have lost two big players and it has taken a bit of time to try and recover our way of working. You get players sometimes who are just a massive loss to a group. Look at the way Dortmund have struggled this season after losing Robert Lewandowski. We haven’t lost one such player, we have lost two.”
Sterling has been coping reasonably well as an emergency striker – though Liverpool sorely missed a finisher as composed as Suárez or Sturridge with a surprising amount of chances at Old Trafford last week – and is likely to continue against Arsenal because Mario Balotelli is suspended. “Raheem was slaughtered for missing those chances, but the boy has been brilliant for us, absolutely fantastic,” Rodgers said. “He was the extra log on the fire for us last year, he was outstanding. This year he has been very good too, and on his own really.”