Now You're Gonna Believe Them

“You must’ve cheated”
“I didn’t”
“Yeah, don’t give me that. You’ve changed the database to add some big players who wouldn’t ever join your club”
“No, no I didn’t.  Here, have a look at my squad. All these players are those who weren’t wanted by other clubs”
“Ok, well then you must’ve manipulated the scores. Each time you went behind you turned it off and started again”
“Well…..we were hardly ever behind so I didn’t need to”
“Ok, well bless you, you enjoy your fantasy.  It would never happen in real life”

This is a scenario that’s gone on around the world for any of us who’ve played Football Manager and published blogs of our progress.  One of the ultimate addictive facets to the game is the ability to take control of a ‘little club’ and guide them to glory, dreaming of press conferences, awards and team talks where you get to pit your wits against Barcelona, Bayern Munich or Real Madrid.

What we have just witnessed in English football is an achievement of Football Manager proportions.  These things weren’t supposed to come true, in these days of clubs as behemoths burning more money than some countries GDP, football looked for all the world as though without money no club could hope to succeed.  Maybe in cup competitions the minnows could progress, mainly through luck of the draw as the bigger sides knock each other out, and maybe through the luck of timing.  A little club could come up against a big side who field a side to protect their stars as they are days away from a crucial European match.  Plus, cup competitions may only require you to negotiate six or seven matches.  But a league competition?  Surely that goes on too long for a lesser side to prevail?

But Leicester City has defied all the odds and overturned considered convention. 

There are plenty of reasons, or maybe even excuses, clubs can identify to suggest why they’re not currently winning titles.  Maybe they don’t have enough money to buy the quality of player to win trophies, their ground isn’t big enough to bring in enough revenue to afford these players’ wages.  They’ve given youth players a go but they’re struggling to come to terms with the higher standard of play.  All their best players get poached by bigger clubs.  They need a quality goalscorer, or a quality centre-half or a talented goalkeeper.  All those cost money and none of those players are interested in playing for clubs who don’t compete in European competitions.

Leicester has just blown all those excuses out of the water.  They ripped up the rulebook and laughed in the face of “it cannot be done”.  Of course there are a number of factors which have helped them achieve this, mainly the abject performances of other clubs who really should’ve won a league title when only 77 points were required for success.

It’s not just the big boys who’ve had their noses put out of joint and given homework for the summer to work out how they take on Leicester, but clubs who were above The Foxes in early 2015 are all now going to reassess their goals and aspirations.

DREAM BIG

There is a story often given by positive speakers about fleas in a jar.  If you put fleas in a jar and put the lid on, the fleas will jump up and hit their heads on the lid.  They keep doing this for a while until they work out that if they jump just below the level of the lid then they don’t get a headache.  They condition themselves so well they keep on doing this.  If you then remove the lid what happens?  The fleas keep jumping to the level of just below the lid as they’re not aware the lid has been removed.  You can keep them in that jar with the lid off for ages as they’ve been conditioned to believe that jumping any higher will bring them pain.

This is where many clubs who would consider themselves on a par with Leicester, now find themselves.  The lid has been lifted but have they got the ability to realise or the dreams to be able to jump higher?

Some clubs appeared to start the season with acceptance of a relegation battle.  They only really got to work once the drop was a very real possibility and suddenly they put in big enough performances to get them out of the mire.

Leicester’s success isn’t a fluke.  Although it is true this should give many people confidence in aiming to achieve the impossible, you can’t just turn up with a group of players, run around a lot and hope to win the league.  Leicester’s success may actually have been a perfect storm.

Will there be another season when Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United and Chelsea all lose a total of 38 matches between them?  Compare that with last season when they lost a total of 25 between them.  That is not to belittle Leicester’s achievement, it’s not their fault those big four clubs all had a meltdown at the same time.  One of the benefits for Leicester for next season is the panic which now pervades the boardrooms of all four clubs to try and work out how to re-arrange their business plans.  Already two of them have announced new management, with another one rumoured to, and the fourth resisting the urge for now. 

There is no single factor which has contributed to Leicester’s stunning title win and in a way what this has proven is that money alone cannot win you a title, but then Manchester City are evidence you need a little more than just money to win league titles.  The fact Leicester staved off relegation last season from a seemingly desperate position will have gone someway for them believing they could achieve anything.

Leicester fell to the bottom of the Premier League at the end of November 2014 when they lost 2-3 at QPR.  It was their seventh defeat in the first thirteen matches of the season, and began a run of six straight defeats.  They ended it by beating Hull City but on New Year’s Day they were still bottom of the pile

The table on New Year’s Day morning makes interesting reading.  Leicester were bottom, with Burnley and then Crystal Palace three points above them.  The fortunes of those bottom three eighteen months on is interesting.  Leicester are now Premier League Champions, Crystal Palace are in the FA Cup Final and Burnley have just won the Championship title.

When Leicester lost at Tottenham in late March they were seven points from safety with just nine matches to go.  The proceeded to lose just one of those nine, at home to the eventual champions Chelsea, and drew at Sunderland.  All the rest they won.  Back-to-back wins against West Ham and West Brom saw them finally drag themselves from the bottom of the table in mid-April.  Those remaining seven matches are enlightening when looking back now.  They only conceded in two of those matches, the Chelsea defeat and the final game 5-1 thrashing of QPR.  Fast forward to this season and they have kept fifteen clean-sheets.  More tellingly twelve of these have come in the second half of the season.  Between the Boxing Day defeat at Anfield and the 2-2 draw at home to West Ham in mid-April, they played fifteen matches and only conceded in four.  They lost just once, at Arsenal and the consistency is one huge reason for their success.

WORK ETHIC

They have a work ethic, as so many have identified, and this where they work so hard for each other.  They swarm all over sides.  They don’t need to worry about possession of the ball as they’ve proved their ability to retrieve possession, they lead the league in interceptions, and then counter attack at pace.  They possess a striker, Jamie Vardy, who never stops running and has scored 24 goals.  He also broke the Premier League record for consecutive games scored in.  They’ve identified their strengths and worked them thoroughly.  Not worry about not having the ball as long as they can nick it when their opponents are pushing forward, get it up the pitch quickly and then have a striker who can convert more often than not.  Largely Vardy has made the same run time and again every game, all season and yet sides have still to combat it.  They have a greater conversion rate of chances than any other club in the league.

There is also a fascinating synergy between the last two seasons.  They’ve been crowned Champions after 139 days at the top of the table.  Last season they were at the bottom for 140 days.

Claudio Ranieri deserves all the plaudits heading his way, so do the owners for choosing him against others better judgement.  But the groundwork within the club set up by the backroom staff and Nigel Pearson last season, is what has gone a long, long way towards their success.  The medical staff have found a way of preparing and looking after players who have been able to survive the rigours of a 38-game season without a soft-tissue injury anywhere.  Many felt sorry for him when a re-financed Chelsea ditched him for Mourinho in 2004.  Leicester is his sixth club appointment since then and he came from a less than auspicious experience as manager of Greece.  He was not to know of the turmoil behind the scenes within the Greek FA and was only in charge for four matches.  In nearly thirty years of management this is his first league title.  Few begrudge him that.

Have they been lucky? I think they have, but then again they’ve seized on an opportunity and run with it.  They’ve lost three games all season, with only two clubs ever getting the better of them (Arsenal, twice, Liverpool, once).  Chelsea lost just three last season, which puts that into perspective.  They have been clear of injuries, but then as has just been mentioned, they have created their own luck in that department.  They didn’t seem to suffer from any contentious decisions by officials, possibly until the Vardy sending off against West Ham.  They didn’t have many goals chalked off or many goals given against them where replays suggested otherwise.

What Leicester has proved is that there is no substitute for hard work, planning and preparation.  Ranieri didn’t make too many adjustments to the 2014-15 side but the changes he did make were crucial.  There are all sorts of stats about how little they’ve spent compared to the bigger clubs in English football, but what they have generated is a fantastic team spirit where the players are prepared to sacrifice themselves for each other.  There are no huge egos at the club, no big names.  At the end of last year I read a comment from someone about how Leicester would struggle to keep hold of players like Vardy and Mahrez.  Now I’m sure the club is looking forward to barging in on their rivals transfer negotiations, saying “don’t go there, they haven’t got Champions League football”.

PREDICTIONS ARE USELESS

I tweeted towards the end of November about the incredibly tough run of fixtures they had coming up.  They’d just won at Newcastle and gone to the top of the table after thirteen games.  Their run was Manchester United (h), Swansea (a), Chelsea (h), Everton (a), Liverpool (a), Manchester City (h).  My argument was they’d gained a lot of points against weaker opposition.  They’d only picked up two points from games against Tottenham, Arsenal and Manchester United.  I, like many others, expected them to fall away.  I expected them to find the going tough, players would pick up injuries, etc, etc.  .  Most people were likely to have agreed with me about Leicester’s chances, although there was one chap who reckoned they’d get “12 points there easy”.  Take a bow Ross Bell (@RossBell1984), you were almost on the money.  They picked up thirteen points, winning three, drawing two and losing just one of those six matches, at Liverpool.

When they lost at The Emirates in mid-February many people expected Arsenal to go on and take the title.  They were two points behind Leicester and with a supposedly far superior squad and a manager who’d experienced a title win.  But from there Leicester really hit a rhythm, gaining nineteen points from a possible twenty-one over the next seven games, conceding in just one.  A series of 1-0 wins took them further ahead of the pack.  In contrast, Arsenal’s seven matches earned them just nine points.  In the days of George Graham at Arsenal the fans frequently sang “one-nil to the Arsenal”.  All these years later they’d been “out Arsenal-ed” by Leicester City.  58,000 is the average attendance at Arsenal, whereas Champions Leicester only house 32,000 every week.  Even Aston Villa command a higher average attendance.

NO COMPARISON

Was this the ‘greatest story ever told’ in football?  There have been a couple of contenders to challenge this.  Ipswich winning the title in 1962 a year after winning the Second Division title.  Nottingham Forest won the league in 1978 a year after finishing third in the Second Division.  They then went onto win back-to-back European Cups.  The Forest side is a decent comparison with Leicester in that they didn’t have any superstars, until Brian Clough signed one of the best goalkeepers in the world, Peter Shilton.  But other than that they had a lot of players who inidividually weren’t necessarily anything special, but collectively were very hard to beat.  Liverpool had just won back-to-back league titles and also the European Cup, a year after the UEFA Cup.  They contained internationals such as Clemence, Neal, Hughes, Hansen, Thompson, Souness, Dalglish, McDermott and Ray Kennedy.  They won the league by seven points which is the equivalent of ten points today.

In the sixties the league was won by eight different teams.  In the seventies six different clubs won the First Division.  In the last ten years just three different clubs have won the title.  This is not to denigrate either Ipswich or Forest’s achievements but money has changed everything, especially expectations.  

WHAT NEXT?

Leicester may do quite well in Europe, particularly as their brand of football should be very difficult for foreign teams to contend with as they rarely come up against it.  The key could be to keep the same group of players.  It will be important for them to recruit well, paying particular attention to attitude and temperament.  All the talk coming out of the King Power Stadium is they intend to do just that.  What remains for them next season is anybody’s guess.  So many, including their own supporters, got this season wrong so it seems churlish to try and predict anything further of this wonderful story.  Personally, I’m going to just sit back and enjoy it.  One of the most popular successes for many a year.  Let’s hope that success doesn’t ruin the players or the team spirit.

What is Going on Out There?

This season has been different right from kick-off.  Up to the halfway point there is no runaway leader and the previous big four are now spread throughout the table.  Chelsea’s awful season has opened up opportunities for other clubs, but also Leicester City’s emergence has thrown the form book out the window.  Right from the early part of the season Crystal Palace and West Ham have occupied top seven places, and Watford’s recent run has seen them move into that once longed for esteemed group.

The big clubs have struggled to put consistent runs together as what was thought just a strange start to a season has become a constant source of frustration for those who believed they knew the script.  For some this is a welcome alternative to believing you could predict the top four or top six before a ball has been kicked.  For others, the trend of each team beating each other has created the sense that despite losing a few matches, a club can still climb several places with a few wins.  My own club, Liverpool are a case in point.  Despite taking just one point from games against Newcastle, West Brom and Watford, we are only five points off a top four place.

So what is it about this season that has made it so close?

I believe there are several important factors which have all contributed.  During this article I will make reference to ‘bigger’ and ‘lesser’ clubs.  This is not to denigrate or disrespect any club, it is merely to demonstrate how some clubs are perceived to be perennial achievers or strugglers and how some clubs performances this season has been very different to how they were expected to perform.

Fancy Dans

First of all the Premier League is a poorer place as far as world class players are concerned.  When you look back a number of stars of the world game have left these shores over the past five years or so.  Players such as Suarez, Modric, Bale, Mascherano, Tevez, van Persie, Drogba, Gerrard and Lampard have all vacated the league and it is poorer for it.  The likes of Aguero, Toure, Hazard, Ozil, Sanchez, Di Maria, Falcao have come in with varying degrees of success but it is difficult to say who is the best player in the league right now.  Hazard was fantastic last season and a deserved player of the year but this season has been a shadow of his former self.  Aguero can’t seem to string more than a couple of games together, Di Maria came in and was a complete failure and Falcao looks as if he’d be better off in another country.  Ozil is beginning to show his class and Sanchez has been excellent since his arrival at Arsenal, but he’s suffering an injury at the moment.

My point is there are some decent players, some very good ones but world class?  Not sure.  But what does seem to have happened is we have gone back to the type of player from abroad who is given the label “he’s good but can he do it on a cold Tuesday night at Stoke?”

When the Premier League began to plunder foreign leagues for new talent this was a common problem.  Often it would take foreign players a season or so to adjust to the pace and physicality of the league.  Which is what made Fernando Torres debut season for Liverpool all the more stunning.  Of course there have been a whole host of players who have come in and hit the ground running, but for those who possess ‘potential’ or maybe just average ability then they can take a while to settle in.  Some of the ‘bigger’ clubs have gone for this type of player, a fancy dan rather than a grafter. 

TV Deal

The new TV deal, a reported £5.14bn, has given many clubs the ability to buy players who once may have been out of reach.  The equality with which the Premier League dishes out the prize money from TV has contributed to many lesser clubs being able to sign players who may only have previously come over here for the bigger clubs.  Yohan Cabaye at Crystal Palace is an example.  He was at Paris St. Germain and with Champions League football almost guaranteed every year, but he chose to return to England to play under Alan Pardew who’d been his boss at Newcastle. 

Stoke City is another example where they have been able to sign the likes of Bojan Krkic and Xherdan Shaqiri.  Bojan was signed from Barcelona, having spent time at Roma, Milan and Ajax, yet he chose Stoke City for his chance to play in the Premier League.  This in no way is to suggest there is anything wrong with Stoke but Bojan is not the type of player they have attracted in the past.  Shaqiri, a Swiss international, was at Basle when there was intense speculation over his next move.  He was reportedly a target for Liverpool but when Bayern Munich came calling he found it too tempting to turn down.  He then moved onto Inter yet Stoke managed to lure him from Serie A. 

The new riches enjoyed by more clubs within the Premier League has enabled players like Cabaye, Bojan and Shaqiri to go to clubs not really considered ‘big’.  The FFP rules have also had an effect on stopping the bigger clubs from just hoovering up all the best talent, and so this talent can now be spread more evenly within the league.

Counter Attack

Many of the lesser clubs no longer just turn up at Old Trafford, Anfield or The Emirates believing they should just lay down and hand over the three points.  They believe if they have a go they might be able to get something from the game.  The other major contributory factor with this is the adoption of the counter attack as a tactic.  Teams are happy to sit back and soak up the pressure and then hit their opponents on the break, at pace.  Leicester City is a prime example of that.  This has been particularly effective in enticing the bigger clubs to keep the ball, knock it around and generally show off but then when they lose it, they’re hit on the break and found to have not left anyone manning the fort at the back.

If you put these two factors together you have a toxic mix, as far as the bigger clubs are concerned, where many league games can be like cup ties with a baying crowd urging their team on as they smell the blood of big names who have spent the past ten to fifteen years lauding it as if it’s some sort of birth right.

It makes for an exciting season and with points seemingly more generously spread throughout the table then few can be sure of where they will finish until we move towards March and April.

Is this a trend or a freak? 

Going back to the point about the type of foreign player who has been recruited by Premier League clubs, many of them are young and come under the ‘potential’ category.  Within a few seasons many of these players should start to realise this potential and become stars.  We may well find those clubs who have recruited more wisely will begin to pull away from the others again, but until this happens we can enjoy a much more equitable competition than we have had to endure for the past five years or so.

Is it Time?

Is there a time for keeping a distance
A time to turn your eyes away
Is there a time for keeping your head down
For getting on with your day

If you’ve read any of my material before hopefully you will know I’m not one for knee-jerking.  I despair at clubs/supporters who want a change of manager after just a few matches into a new season.  Owners and Chairman have tried to justify this treatment by arguing if they leave things as they are then the club could a long way from their target, whereas making a change early enough means they can still have a decent season.

Being more of your ‘old-school’ Liverpool fan I have always been proud of the patience the club generally has had with managers.  Roy Hodgson was the exception.  He shouldn’t have been chosen in the first place, he was a victim of a power struggle between two owners who were hanging onto something they’d lied through their teeth to gain.  It was clear from the style of play and the players he signed that it just wasn’t going to work and as soon as the two cowboys were sent packing by FSG, they wasted no time in bringing in a replacement.

The club had become a joke and was on the back pages for all the wrong reasons.  Kenny Dalglish was the perfect answer.  He brought the fans back onside and re-introduced a good feeling around the place.  Of course his presence presented many other problems as the club still wasn’t achieving in the League as we all wouldn’t wanted, but two cup finals softened the blow a tad.  But with fans so desperate for success playing at home became a hindrance rather than an advantage.  If the team didn’t score early enough the fans would get nervous and this would translate back to the players.  This lead to another problem when an icon is chosen to lead the club back to the promised land, in that it becomes almost sacrilege or blasphemy to criticise him.  Dalglish went for a short-cut in the transfer market with a policy of buying British in a belief it often takes a foreign player longer to settle in.  He made one big exception, Luis Suarez, who was an exceptional player.

FSG decided at the end of the first full season they wanted a change.  I didn’t personally like the way they went about it, but they were decisive and so they were at least worthy of being trusted in some way.  They were such a difference from the previous clowns that in some way you just ignore one or two things you don’t like in the hope the ‘greater good’ is, well, better.

Brendan Rodgers wouldn’t have been my choice to take over from Kenny Dalglish but he was a promising coach, young and British and in some way there was something about a coach like him getting a job at the top six club when the fashion was to look abroad.  He came in with a reputation for attractive passing football and it wasn’t that long before you could see the changes he was making on the training ground were having an effect on matchday.  Many of us were prepared to give him time, where others wanted him gone after an opening day defeat at West Brom.  Steven Gerrard’s assertion he was a good manager went much of the way towards the time he was given by the fans.

The second half of his first season was much better as things appeared to be falling into place.  Two 5-0 wins and two 4-0 wins contributed to a feel-good factor culminating in a 6-0 demolition at Newcastle.  This last match was significant as it was the first match without Suarez after his incident with Ivanovic.  The play that day was a pleasure to watch as Sturridge looked as if he relished his role and responsibility.

The second season is one which will live long in the memory as suddenly we were on the verge of a League title.  The team was playing some of the most exciting football seen here and people like me were having to think back to the magnificent teams of 1987-1989 or the 1978-1980 to remember whether we’d ever seen better.  The 5-1 destruction of Arsenal when we were 4-0 up in the opening twenty minutes, 4-0 wins over Everton and Tottenham and a 3-0 win at Old Trafford combined to the growing belief it was our time.  When we beat Manchester City 3-2 on the 25^th anniversary of Hillsborough it just seemed as if nothing could stop us.  In the end something did and we had to settle for second place.  But we believed we’d found a method, a way of playing and a manager who could take us places.

Then Suarez left.

I always hoped he would give us one year of Champions League football, but as it was he’d already promised Steven Gerrard that a year earlier, and so when Barcelona came in he just couldn’t resist.  Sturridge was injured too and so we were robbed of the opportunity of seeing that team, which had held so many people spellbound months earlier, perform on the European stage.

Two wins and three defeats from the first six League games produced an agitated feeling around the place.  Six defeats from the first twelve matches, along with the limp attempt at qualifying from a Champions League group it seemed impossible not to, just provided further ammunition for those who always doubted Rodgers.

The sixth defeat in the league provided a turning point as it demonstrated how far the team had gone from the free-flowing pacey attacking side we had witnessed six months before.  Against Crystal Palace our attacking build-up was so laborious Crystal Palace found it far too easy to sit back, soak up the pressure and then hit us on the break.  What followed was one defeat in the next seventeen League matches and a run of thirteen unbeaten.  This took us to within two points of Manchester United in fourth and things were looking much more promising.

The story is that Rodgers had spent a whole day and night in his office desperately trying to work out what had gone wrong and how he was going to turn it round.  This is where he hit upon the tactic of using wing-backs and playing three at the back.  It worked.  Teams couldn’t adjust to our style of play and gradually the confidence returned.  Until, that is, we met Manchester United. 

United weren’t playing with much confidence themselves but that day van Gaal had a tactic to combat ours and exposed our wing-backs.  In the end we might have scrambled a draw but it would’ve been more than we deserved.  We then got thumped at Arsenal and our confidence looked shot.  Personally, I could stomach those defeats as even United themselves have had seasons where they’ve finished in the top four with a poor record against other top four sides.  What I couldn’t accept was what followed.

A goalless draw at West Brom and the defeat at Hull City was unacceptable.  Six points from those games would have us two points behind United with four games to go and fourth place would still have been on the cards.  From there the season just fell away in such a pathetic way with us finishing sixth and suffering the most embarrassing League defeat since the days of Souness.

Saturday’s defeat to Manchester United means we have lost seven of our last fourteen matches.  So this is where I believe changing things now is not necessarily a result of the first five games of this season.  Changes were made over the summer but all they seem to have done is make it harder for Rodgers to be flexible.  Intent on a 4-3-3 system he has backed himself into a corner to have to play Milner in central midfield and use players like Firmino in a sort of wide position.  Rodgers has always failed to resist the idea of playing players in unfamiliar positions.  Even in his early days he was accused by loanee, Sahin, as using him in a different role to one he promised.  Johnson and Flanagan swapped flanks to differing levels of success and of course last season there were times when Sterling was utilised in a wing-back role.

There is little doubt we are missing Daniel Sturridge and the club’s insistence of not buying a decent striker last season has continued to plague us.  Christian Benteke looked a good signing but with a flaw Tim Sherwood identified at Villa.  Benteke had struggled to seem interested under Paul Lambert yet when Sherwood took over suddenly he was scoring goals.  The difference?  Sherwood identified Benteke needed support from the wings and now with Sterling disappearing to Manchester City we seem devoid of width.  So many Premier League sides play a compact system that any team with attacking wide players are bound to find some success.  Why Milner has not been used in this role is a mystery, but perhaps Jordan Henderson’s absence through injury has forced Rodgers to use Milner’s experience in the centre.

After a tentative start we were torn apart by West Ham at Anfield.  Fortunately the international break gave time to prepare for the trip to Old Trafford, which is why the manner of the performance is what is most galling.  There was no passion, no spirit and no obvious idea of what was expected from a team playing against the fiercest of rivals.  It was said long ago that buying in too many ‘foreign’ players would dilute the passion of a big clash as those players would little understand the history and rivalry as the fans do.  But many of these players have played for clubs who have ‘big clashes’ each year and must surely have realised, unless they’d been playing in the moon, that Liverpool v Manchester United is one of the biggest games in English football, no matter where the teams are in the table.  Watching the performance at Old Trafford you could be forgiven for thinking these players believed they were up against FC United of Manchester.

Rodgers has been methodical about dealing with past hurdles before and generally his instinct has worked but we’re back in a ‘rebuilding’ situation as we were a few months ago and how long must we put up with this?

It was barely seventeen months ago we were one of the most exciting teams around and even neutrals were saying to me how much they were enjoying our football.  Yet here we are now, almost dreading the next game, concentrating more on where we’re weak rather than where we can hurt the opposition.  Perhaps that’s because the performances this season give little evidence of where we can hurt anyone, Coutinho aside.  The return of Sturridge and Henderson to the side could well see a turn in fortunes and again it could be argued with so many teams beating each other this season, that a club can afford a few poor games yet still finish in a position to compete for a top four place.  Rodgers’ teams have generally performed better after Christmas than before and so another good run in the New Year could wipe out these current emotions, but, and it is a big but, what if he cannot reproduce that?

Of course another of my criticisms of supporters calling for a change of manager is their lack of the ability to suggest a suitable replacement.  You could argue I’m in the same position as it would appear the only credible alternative is Jurgen Klopp.  It has recently been rumoured he is holding out to replace Guardiola at Bayern and so Liverpool’s search may continue.

Any replacement will have to deal with the same group of players but at least they won’t feel they need to be loyal to some they’ve purchased, or determined to prove another player can make it.  Where a replacement could make a difference is in defence.  Lovren and Skrtel seem to be given more leeway than previous players who transgressed, so much so one begins to believe they are immovable.

One aspect which seems to have emerged this season is teams’ desire and ability to play a counter-attacking game.  Evidence of this can be seen in how many away wins there have been so far.  The irony is we used to be one of the most exciting, fastest attacking sides around and yet we’re back to a ponderous build up with only Gomez and Clyne keen to push on.

There is a school of thought that maintains FSG will manage Liverpool in a similar way they have with Boston Red Socks and so Rodgers may well be comfortable in his job for a while yet.  But we simply cannot afford to sit out another Champions League season and fall further and further behind our rivals on a financial footing.

It gives me no pleasure to say this but I think it is now time for a change at Anfield.