A cracking op. How could anyone disagree with it?
I don't get the sense that there's any genuine opposition towards Rodgers as manager though. Maybe it seems that way when having to wade through pages of post-match moaning after a bad result.
People will always debate and criticise about players, tactics and rights & wrongs of every decision - it's something unique to football on t'internet. In fact, I'd say it was feature of comment on the internet and social media full stop. Everyone has opinions and some feel the need to express them more than others. Some people express them in ways that others find objectionable.
My own view is that what people say on internet message boards and blogs is on balance, fairly benign in terms of its overall influence. The quality of well written, argued and balanced writing will always hold sway over the negative for the sake of it posts, whatever their volume.
It may seem counter intuitive, but this site should be seeking to attract as many "whoppers" and "muppets" to these pages as possible. It's an opportunity to educate and inform. It's a painful process and a thankless task a lot of the time, but rather have someone read just one decent post (or even a part of it) here than have them congregate together elsewhere and give the (false) impression of a growing consensus of disillusionment.
The temptation in times of stress and difficulty is to batten down the hatches and seek solace in the company of like minded individuals. However, I feel that contributes to the fragmentation of our support, and restricts the opportunities to get quality posts like the op here (and many others on this site) to a much wider audience.
The real danger is the media - the third estate, not the social form that we all indulge in to varying degrees. That's where the opinion forming and malign influence resides - more so with tv than with newspapers, though the two are still very closely linked. The written form provides much of the source material for the visual format, which then condenses it down into segmented soundbites to be regurgitated and repeated ad nauseum to whatever target audience their advertising paymasters are after.
It was the media that hounded Rafa out of a job. They could have defended him as a football eccentric or maverick - hard to like for the neutral but widely respected by football people. No -lets ignore his achievements and ridicule his speech, his appearance, his silly zonal marking etc. Same with Kenny - all ok while he was King Kenny on his return, but it all turned sour when he decided to defend that horrible Suarez fella and mess up all their "racist" headlines. Then he was "bad Kenny", out of touch with modern football. They could have defended him as football legend, and acknowledged a run of poor results was part and parcel of his rebuilding programme with the new owners.
Modern football is all about revenue streams for the owners - how to monetise their football commodity. Bad press damages brand value and annoys advertisers and sponsors. It's a sad "fact" of modern football - but it's to be avoided at all costs.
I think that Brendan Rodgers has established a good relationship with the *cough* "esteemed" members of the press and that will buy him a lot more time to work through the results (good and bad) he needs to establish his football at LFC. He's on good terms with the owners too. Those two factors are massively in his favour, and far outweigh any sense of unrest amongst supporters - which is nothing more than frustration borne out of inconsistent results and performances. See euphoria after Fulham win and despair after Villa & Stoke. We'll have another uplift or despair session after the next transfer window - there will always be extreme reactions to every situation that the club encounters.
It's up to the writers and contributors to sites like this to provide some balance, insight & perspective - which, the writer of the op has done admirably on this occasion.
