There are some great posts on this thread, and a lot of serious thought and insight.
I think if this season taught us anything, it is about the value of a striker. Last year we went so close, because in Suarez, we had a striker who gave us enormous tactical flexibility, and made virtually every system we employed look better. Suarez had enormous pace, strength, and ability to hold up the ball, or dribble, and link up. He could run in behind the opposition, which terrified most defences, but if you sat deep, he could drop a little deeper, and receive a long pass, and turn and commit defenders, or instantly finding a teammate. Virtually every pass to suarez turned into a good pass. If you ran to a good position, off him, suarez would definitely be able to receive the ball and find you. The goals were also great, but I'm more concerned with his impact on the way we played as a team.
Suarez made raheem sterling into a much better player. Every time he overelaborated, or made the wrong decision, suarez would scream at him. When he started to do what suarez told him, he became a much more effective player, and suarez set him up for a lot of goals, and scored from a lot of his passes. and Then Suarez would shower him in love when he did the right thing. Defenders looking around nervously to see where suarez went, meant that sturridge made hay. I suppose the point ultimately is that Suarez was the sort of complete forward that could make any system work. Coutinho flourished in the maelstrom of high speed attacking movement.
I suppose the point of mentioning this is that Having a player like suarez means that he breaks the link between results, and whether or not you are doing the best job of organizing and fielding your other 10 players. You get a lot of false positives. For instance, we nearly won the league, that would almost indicate with certainty that our defence was well organized, and our midfield was offering them adequate cover. That was very far from the case. We let in 50 league goals. Essentially, you can't really see the areas where a manager is supposed to be making the real difference to the team. Identifying that you have a brilliant player, and building the front half of the team to support him is only one part of the job.
You see, even after three years, it's not clear what Brendan Rodgers' vision of football is. It seems to change all the time. I was listening to Steven Hunt talking about him on the second captains podcast, and he writes a very readable, and interesting column in the Sunday Independent. Firstly Hunt really likes rodgers as a person, and is very grateful to him for the thoughtful and decent way he dealt with him around the time he was leaving the club. (Echoing what Roy Keane says about rodgers the man.) But there was a very big gap between the way rodgers talked about football post swansea, and when he was at reading. At Reading it was all 4-3-3, resting on the ball, quick attacking transitions, and set pieces. And if you didn't know that he had been at chelsea, learning from mourinho, he would use portuguese words all the time. Hunt's reaction was "why are you using portuguese words, you're from Northern Ireland." Then after swansea it was death by football, and bringing out the technical skills in players. Two years at a club with a different culture of playing, and he was talking about playing in almost exactly the opposite way about football. He had made the philosophical jump from being a disciple of Mourinho to being a disciple of Guardiola.
Brendan received a lot of credit for the way that swansea took the premiership by storm. However, with the benefit of hindsight, it might be more appropriate to see Brendan as one in a line of managers who has implemented basically the same way of playing, and this consistency of style has enable a club with a 20,000 seater stadium regularly finish in the top half of the premier league, win a cup, get into europe, and generate huge profits along the way. He did a great job with them, and got them promoted, unlike martinez, but he didn't really invent that way of playing at all.
Now ideally, this could indicate the sign of a tacitcally flexible mind. Someone who was prepared to see football from both sides, before melding the two into a perfect fusion of physical, defensively well drilled total football. But after three years that's not really what has happened at all is it? We're still conceding an average of 47 goals a season. We're keeping a clean sheet in about a third of our games, but we're letting in an average of two goals in all of the rest. We're a shambles at defending set pieces. In the past people used to love to jump on Rafa when zonal marking at set pieces went wrong (but never showing all the times it went right) but now they show us defending like fools at set pieces, and there's no upside to that.
I think what we may have seen over the last three years was Brendan adapting his view of how football played a third time to fit the circumstances of the club he was managing. When he took over the two main pillars of the team were Gerrard and Suarez. So instead of implementing all of the things that he was hired to implement, he set about getting the most out of those two players. And that looked glorious last season. However this season, with Suarez gone, and with a load of money to sign players to implement his vision, we were left with a frequently shambolic defence, an unbalanced midfield, and a frequently non-functioning attack. We're no nearer seeing a cohesive style of play, that balances defensive organization and cohesive work off the ball, with an identifiable, possession based system of play when we do have the ball.
A certain amount of this can be put down to needing to accommodate Steven Gerrard, who offered a lot to us in terms of leadership by example, and ability to distribute the ball accurately and effectively over long distances. However he offered very little when we didn't have the ball, due to toll taken by age and injury, and his struggles with adapting to a deeper lying role. When Dejan Lovren was playing well at southampton the season before, he had a regular defensive partner, two well drilled full backs, he had fraser Forster behind him, and schneiderlein and wanyama in front of him. Everything was set up for him to succeed. This season, we've offered him no midfield cover, and chopped and changed our defence constantly while asking him to play in a way that leaves him more exposed to counter attackers.. No wonder he's struggled.
The big worry I would take from the season just gone, is that there was no coherent plan. When suarez left, we needed to find a forward who at least did all the things that suarez did that sturridge couldn't really do. We did nothing of the sort. That combined with sturridge's injury put enormous pressure on the rest of the team, to overcome the loss of attacking potency. Without an effective line leading forward, who could link up with teammates, it was No wonder that so many of our new signings struggled. There was no clear, and effective way of playing for them to fit into. If you look back at the way we seemed to be able to seamlessly introduce players into the liverpool way of playing, back at our peak, it was made easier by us having such a consistent and all encompassing way of playing. If you wanted a fight, then we'd give you a fight. When we defended, we defended as a unit. When we had the ball, we could attack down either flank, or through the middle, and switch effortlessly between both sides. We had forwards who could score every sort of goal, so you didn't know how to defend against us, and as a defender, our players only gave you bad choices. A new signing was given a defined role, and could adapt to it, while being supported by top class players, who were all doing their own job consistently well. Bob Paisley and joe Fagan's teams were so dominant at home, and in europe because they had such a well ingrained system of play, that enable intelligent players to show tactical awareness, to consistently find weaknesses in whatever opponent they played. So many times we went to some far flung corner of europe, shut the opposition down, and grabbed an away goal, before bringing them home to anfield and smashing into them like a train.
This consistency of approach and all encompassing nature of style of play characterized Ferguson's time at man utd. Like us at our peak, it was never a question of only having a really good plan A. There was also plan B, C and D to take out of the drawer at the appropriate time. Like us at our peak, they always seemed to find a way. That's how you win titles. Again like us at our peak they had a pretty decent record of making their relatively small number of transfers stick. Ferguson never innovated anything. He just carefully studied what worked really well for other people, and ruthlessly implemented it, within a consistent set of footballing principles. again he didn't come up with this way of doing things. It's how we did things at our peak.
This is why I'm particularly worried about what we saw this season. I don't know if the manager has a clear vision in his head of how it all fits together. If he has a vision in his head that fuses his time learning from mourinho, with his immersion in possession football at swansea, Combining the best features of the two, would be perfect for us. But this season, there was little evidence of this vision on the pitch, and we certainly didn't buy players fitted to achieving it. The point here is that time is ticking. Mourinho is strengthening Chelsea season by season. Arsene Wenger is showing worrying signs of life. Van Gaal is a managerial genius, and more than any other manager in football, he has a clear idea of how it all fits together tactically. With the amount of money at his disposal, god help us all when man utd stop buying players at random, and buy them to fit his system.
The point is that we are a relatively rich club by world standards. We're not as wealthy as the clubs above us, and we can't go out and sign too many of a certain class of established, top quality players. But there are still an awful lot of good players out there, and if you look back at the players we signed when we were at our peak, there were very few world stars signed for massive fees. This is why we need a manager who has a coherent effective style of play, and can find players who fit that system, and make our own stars. Like we used to, back when we kept having to expand the trophy cabinet every season. The question for us this season doesn't hinge around us finishing sixth in the league, wasting a lot of money in the transfer market, losing nearly all our big games, and playing some awful football at times. These things happen. Instead We have to decide if Brendan Rodgers has this vision in his head, and if he can implement it. Because if he can't, we can't afford an other season of drifting along, and finishing outside the CL, while the other clubs pull ahead of us financially.
The potential rewards for success are huge. Regular Champions league football would lead to a big cash injection. A regular place at the top table of european football, would make it easier for us to keep our better players, and attract the players to make the next step to title challengers. Success and exposure in the CL and in title challenges would enable us to use our global fanbase to massively increase our commercial earnings. Expanding our stadium would have a much bigger impact if we were getting five or six CL full houses every season. But in order to achieve this, we need to have the right man in charge. And this season has left me very depressed on that front.
