You [Timbo] have been on this for 9 months now and I've been right behind you every step of the way. I would be lying if I said I had no new-found doubts about Brendan after the past several months, but there's also no need for me to add my 2 pence to the cacophony on that score.
Looking at that team that drunkenly stumbled into sixth place and trying to evaluate much of anything is a fool's errand. It was a patchwork of pieces stitched together, taken out, and stitched into a different pattern again and again - all the while missing a third of the picture. We had no functioning strikers to call on. None. That's not a football team - that's, at best, 10/11ths of a football team. In short, a miasma.
For those who say he should have used Balotelli and Borini more, I can only say this: the good lord only gave you the two eyes (with a possible third eye whose mystic properties will do sweet fuck all for your considerations on football). If you can't see what those two lack on every single level by any reasonable criteria, you are doing your sense of sight a sore disservice. One of them has a workrate that grandfathers would mock - the other runs around as if he's in a track and field squad, having seemingly forgotten the need to get on the actual ball at any point.
This season was all about last summer. I didn't see how badly we fucked up at the time - I was full of pie-eyed excitement over most of the signings (bar Balo, whose capture I was never in favour of). More fool me, but it's neither the first nor the last time I'll be completely wrong about something. We can't truly evaluate this season because we weren't playing with a full deck, literally and figuratively. We can't afford to do that again.
So this particular thread is on its 21st page and the foregoing post is the only one that’s actually reflected fully upon what's happened this past season in context with the two seasons prior. Moreover, it’s one of scarcely a handful that have not allowed perspective to be jaundiced by an underlying, at best distrusting at worst poisonous, agenda against the manager.
Note particularly the wisdom and insightfulness that leaps out of the highlighted paragraph. Compare it to the agenda driven content in so many of the posts in this thread which completely blank out the pivotal reality of last season's debacle in order to use the overriding failure of the season and in particular the rear end collapse as a massive stick with which to beat the manager.
There can be no doubts as to the obvious shortcomings in the manager’s own performance levels but the degree of their impact on the overall debacle of the season is inestimably overstated by all who seek as if on some crusade to hold him totally accountable.
At the heart of it all lies the shameful fact that we were a team without an attack and such a team is not a team at all, no matter who the manager may be, no matter what errors of judgement or strokes of inventive genius that manager might happen to make
But what a fucking sorry state we're in supporter-wise if we have a huge swathe of our fan base who either cannot see or refuse to admit to this reality. The barrage of frustration in this thread ignoring the underlying reality is an embarrassment..
Folks these days may well have their libraries of statistical references but my god so many of them cannot actually bring to bear the remotest rationale, reflection and insight to accompany such reference.
And so it goes on and on. People actually attempting to convince themselves and others of the legitimacy of their judgement on Rodgers culpability and unsuitability when all along staring them full in the face is the risible entire season long fiasco of witnessing a team without a striker/attacking outlet worthy of the name.
I fucking weep for our club if such meagre and skewed thinking calibre of fan represents its future.