http://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/oct/27/luis-suarez-brendan-rodgers-liverpool
Luis Suárez: ‘Brendan said I would like the way we were going to play’
In the final exclusive extract from his new book, Luis Suárez explains how the Liverpool manager’s tactical changes suited him
Luis Suárez
The Guardian, Monday 27 October 2014 22.29 GMT
There was a moment during the first real, in-depth conversation that I had with Brendan Rodgers when I looked at him and it hit me: “He’s right.” We had been talking for a little while, he was explaining the way that he wanted the team to play, and everything was falling into place. Everything he said made perfect sense. I was completely convinced.
When Kenny [Dalglish, the former Liverpool manager] left, the rumours about who would replace him started. That can be unsettling for a player because you don’t always know any more about what’s going on than anyone else does: you’re not so different from the fans, reading about it in the papers. Soon Brendan Rodgers emerged as the favourite. He wasn’t a “big-name” manager and I didn’t know much about him, but Swansea City were a team that stood out because of their attractive style of play; they were different and especially impressive for a team that had only been promoted to the Premier League the season before. One of our last games of the 2011-12 season had been away at Swansea.
I’d bumped into Brendan in a corridor afterwards and he said in Spanish: “You’re an excellent player, congratulations.” I remember thinking: “That’s interesting, the Swansea manager speaks Spanish.”
The first chat I had with him was at Melwood [Liverpool’s training ground], just after he was confirmed as Liverpool’s new manager. It wasn’t a long conversation, just the typical welcome to the club stuff, but he also wanted to talk to me because there had been suggestions there was a chance of me going to Juventus. Brendan spoke to me in Spanish and he told me to give him time, to give him a chance, and that I would like the way we were going to play. It would suit me. He said we would bring the ball out on the floor, keep possession and play attacking football. I remember him saying: “It’s not so hard to bring the ball out from the back on the floor, you know.”
I started to see that things were going to be different. In a nutshell, his philosophy was this: you’ve got four players in the defensive line and you’ve got the goalkeeper, who at the time was Pepe Reina, who is good with the ball at his feet. You’ve got the two central defenders outside the area and you’ve got one of the central midfielders who can come for the ball. And if he’s marked, the other one can come for it. If you have 30 metres from your goalkeeper to the midfield, if the players are good with the ball at their feet, at most the opposition are going to pressure you with two men.
No one else is going to come. If you can pass it well, if your positioning is good, it is impossible for them to take the ball off you. Why? Because you outnumber them and you will always have a line of pass open which allows you to progress up the pitch. A midfielder drops into the space which the central defenders open out, the goalkeeper becomes an “outfield” player and you carry the ball forward that way. I listened and I was sold. It seemed so simple that way but no one had ever walked me through it like that before. I thought: “He’s right, it is impossible in a 30-metre space, with the players Liverpool have got, with the ability that Pepe Reina has with the ball at his feet, for them to get the ball off us.” Unless we made a simple mistake, of course.
Over the first few weeks, that idea was the basis of the work we did with Brendan, the first of the building blocks in constructing a new approach. From the start, it convinced me. It made sense. And although the results weren’t good, I could see that we were playing better. I was excited. Brendan’s philosophy was to play on the floor, keep possession of the ball and, if we lost it, to pressure to get it back. Don’t panic, don’t play so fast as we had the previous season, look for the spaces at the right time.
If I was excited, others were worried. And no, not because of the famous envelopes that appeared during a TV documentary about the club. Mostly, we just joked about that particular episode, but the manager’s methods really worked for us.
For those who didn’t see the documentary, Brendan had got the entire squad together during pre-season soon after he had taken over and showed us three envelopes. He told us that inside each envelope was a piece of paper on which he had written the name of someone who would let the team down during the coming season. It was our duty, he said, to make sure that it wasn’t our name in there. At the end of the year, he would open the envelopes and reveal the names inside. I hadn’t seen a manager do that before and of course afterwards lots of the players were talking about it.
There was a group of us sitting there, and Glen Johnson came over and said: “I know who’s in the envelopes. I know what’s written on all three pieces of paper.” Who? What?
‘“Number 3” . . . “José” . . . and “Enrique”. We fell about. José Enrique protested: “No, no, no, no, inglés – I’m not there, you are!”
We never did find out what was written in those envelopes. It was unusual and I must admit that for a moment I did think: “How can you think before the season has even started that there are three people who are going to let you down? And if there is a name in there and he plays well, and you doubted him, what are you going to do then?’’ I’m sure there were no names, it was just a way of motivating us; a tactic to make sure we gave everything. And in truth it got forgotten pretty quickly.
I was much more interested in the way we were going to play. Others were interested for different reasons. It can be frightening to play like that; it takes nerve. Some centre-backs prefer not to have the ball that often. They prefer not to risk being caught with it. You could see that sometimes the central defenders felt under pressure and wanted to hit it long, but Brendan kept insisting and, gradually, they got used to it.
Slowly they became more comfortable bringing the ball out. We adapted. Danny Agger and Martin Skrtel improved a lot. Technically, they’re fine and they’ve gained more confidence in their ability. They’ve become better players. Before it might be two passes and then hit it long but Brendan has changed that. For that to work, the goalkeeper has to act like another outfield player and right from the start they began to be coached differently too. Confidence came through repetition.
The new style suited me. Playing in England where all the centre-backs are tall and strong, the long punt up the pitch is no good to me, but a quick ball to release me either side of them works well. Mostly, I need the ball on the floor and Brendan knew that and he also worked with me on the movements I could make to isolate defenders. He was confident that if I could take them on one-on-one, I would be likely to beat them. He was keen to play to my strengths and my style suited his.
He knew that I’m a very instinctive player who plays on intuition. He knew that if he put me in as a static number nine, waiting for the wingers to put crosses in, I’d be no good.
Not no good, in fact, but worse than that – I’m not there. He knew that I’m a mobile striker and that a lot of the time you’ll find me outside the area, looking for space, moving. I won’t be there as a target for two wide men to aim crosses at.
Andy Carroll would be, of course. Every coach has his own taste in players and given the type of game that Andy offered, it was natural that Brendan didn’t include him in his plans.
Andy is tall, strong and good in the air. But I think people were wrong about him: he was also technically very good indeed. He can strike a ball very cleanly with his left foot and with so much power. The power he was able to produce always stood out to me in training sessions. It was a shame that injuries reduced the number of times we could play together in our first season at Liverpool.
Yet for a short, passing game in which you’re looking to release people into space with a lot of pace, he doesn’t fit. He wanted to play for England so it was important for him to get games, which meant looking for a way to move on and eventually he joined West Ham on loan. The coach was honest with him, which is always the best way: if you’re not going to select a player, tell him.
Something similar happened with Charlie Adam. Charlie’s passing was good, but it was suited to a longer passing type of game and Brendan wanted shorter, sharper passing and quicker movement.
That shift in style was symbolised by the arrival of Joe Allen from Swansea. Brendan described Joe as the “Welsh Xavi”; it didn’t quite work that way, and that’s some tag to have, but Joe was especially brilliant the first 10 games or so and I thought he was an excellent signing. Brendan knew him really well from their time at Swansea and Joe’s first few games were fantastic. He was very good with the ball, he fitted the philosophy perfectly and defensively he was exceptional; above all, he understood the movements Brendan wanted straight away, while Stevie [Gerrard] and Jordan Henderson began a process of adapting to his style.
With time, they adapted too. In Jordan’s case, the proof came last season. Jordan had changed so much. To start with, maybe he wanted to do too much at once, but he is intelligent and he learned with Brendan in the first year even if he didn’t play much. You watched him the following season and he was playing the passes when he saw them. He was taking his time, he was calmer, cleverer. He learned to understand the movements of Daniel [Sturridge] and me more too, while the shift to a one-touch game suited him. He also rebelled against the critics; maybe they brought out a part of his character that we didn’t know he had. Brendan changed him; he changed us all.
I remembered Rafa Benítez’s Liverpool, which was a team based on being very defensively strong and looking to break, so I didn’t necessarily see the new Liverpool as the recovery of historic values, but soon people were talking about that. I heard fans talking about “pass and move”, the way the great Liverpool sides of the Seventies and Eighties had played.
From my point of view, there was something in that idea of Joe as the Welsh Xavi. I wouldn’t say that we played like Barcelona because it was impossible to emulate the speed, touch and technique of their passing game at the time. But you could see a Spanish influence in the way that Brendan worked. He was interested in Spain, he had studied there, and what he’d learned there was at the heart of our style of play: passing, pressuring high, quick movement, arriving into the area rather than standing there waiting for it, coming inside from wide positions.
It’s not quite that simple, of course. You always have to adapt to your environment. For example, Barcelona wouldn’t be the same in the English league. In Spain they let you play more. The defenders and the midfielders can play but that’s partly because they’re allowed to play. The opponents will come and pressure in the middle of the pitch, but no higher. In England, they pressure you more aggressively, they’re much more on top of you. Barcelona would have to adapt to that. Equally, if you put Liverpool in the Spanish league they would not be the same. When you see a Spanish team play against an English team, you get a glimpse of that: the Spanish team pressures, sure, but it’s different. The English team runs much more, but they often run less intelligently.
Generally, English teams are less well-ordered. Brendan stood out: his tactical work was exceptional while some opponents seemed to do little in this area.
Brendan quickly showed he was adaptable too. Changes were made depending on the opposition. Sometimes, if they only had one up front he would leave three back rather than four and use the full-back to give width and depth to the attack. He also knows that he has to listen to the player, to know what he is comfortable doing, and he’s exceptional at that.
Liverpool are in very good hands with Brendan Rodgers. The way he coached us during my time there was impressive and I am sure that the methods I enjoyed and found so effective will continue to be employed. Everything Brendan does is built towards perfecting the mechanics of football and making adjustments for the next game or to fulfil a particular objective. Although there weren’t any specific instructions to begin with, I knew that as soon as I got into training on Tuesday all the exercises were conditioned by the game the following weekend. It might be a small exercise where we couldn’t yet see what he was working towards, but it was always building towards the match.
He doesn’t explicitly tell players the plans for the game all week long because that would just wear you down and you’d end up switching off. If you came into training on Tuesday and he was already telling us how the opposition’s left-back was going to play then by the Friday we’d all be going mad. So we worked slowly towards the game and then on the Thursday or the Friday, he might say, “they’re weak here” or “they’re vulnerable in this space”. The instructions became more explicit: “Look, if they step up here, you’re faster than them cutting inside”; “They always hold the line and you can run past them”; or “Watch the left-back – he’s the one who reacts slowly and doesn’t step up, playing you onside. He stands watching and doesn’t respond as quickly as the other defenders.”
Sometimes what we worked towards was even more explicitly focused on the opposition. When we faced Andy Carroll again, Brendan had seen that West Ham played the ball to the full-backs who then lofted diagonal balls looking for him. So in training we had Martin Kelly pretending to be Andy, playing like him. We were working against movements that were designed to mimic the way the opposition play.
Brendan didn’t obsess about telling us about opponents constantly, but through working on certain exercises the message seeped into our minds.
Luis Suárez: ‘Brendan said I would like the way we were going to play’
In the final exclusive extract from his new book, Luis Suárez explains how the Liverpool manager’s tactical changes suited him
Luis Suárez
The Guardian, Monday 27 October 2014 22.29 GMT
There was a moment during the first real, in-depth conversation that I had with Brendan Rodgers when I looked at him and it hit me: “He’s right.” We had been talking for a little while, he was explaining the way that he wanted the team to play, and everything was falling into place. Everything he said made perfect sense. I was completely convinced.
When Kenny [Dalglish, the former Liverpool manager] left, the rumours about who would replace him started. That can be unsettling for a player because you don’t always know any more about what’s going on than anyone else does: you’re not so different from the fans, reading about it in the papers. Soon Brendan Rodgers emerged as the favourite. He wasn’t a “big-name” manager and I didn’t know much about him, but Swansea City were a team that stood out because of their attractive style of play; they were different and especially impressive for a team that had only been promoted to the Premier League the season before. One of our last games of the 2011-12 season had been away at Swansea.
I’d bumped into Brendan in a corridor afterwards and he said in Spanish: “You’re an excellent player, congratulations.” I remember thinking: “That’s interesting, the Swansea manager speaks Spanish.”
The first chat I had with him was at Melwood [Liverpool’s training ground], just after he was confirmed as Liverpool’s new manager. It wasn’t a long conversation, just the typical welcome to the club stuff, but he also wanted to talk to me because there had been suggestions there was a chance of me going to Juventus. Brendan spoke to me in Spanish and he told me to give him time, to give him a chance, and that I would like the way we were going to play. It would suit me. He said we would bring the ball out on the floor, keep possession and play attacking football. I remember him saying: “It’s not so hard to bring the ball out from the back on the floor, you know.”
I started to see that things were going to be different. In a nutshell, his philosophy was this: you’ve got four players in the defensive line and you’ve got the goalkeeper, who at the time was Pepe Reina, who is good with the ball at his feet. You’ve got the two central defenders outside the area and you’ve got one of the central midfielders who can come for the ball. And if he’s marked, the other one can come for it. If you have 30 metres from your goalkeeper to the midfield, if the players are good with the ball at their feet, at most the opposition are going to pressure you with two men.
No one else is going to come. If you can pass it well, if your positioning is good, it is impossible for them to take the ball off you. Why? Because you outnumber them and you will always have a line of pass open which allows you to progress up the pitch. A midfielder drops into the space which the central defenders open out, the goalkeeper becomes an “outfield” player and you carry the ball forward that way. I listened and I was sold. It seemed so simple that way but no one had ever walked me through it like that before. I thought: “He’s right, it is impossible in a 30-metre space, with the players Liverpool have got, with the ability that Pepe Reina has with the ball at his feet, for them to get the ball off us.” Unless we made a simple mistake, of course.
Over the first few weeks, that idea was the basis of the work we did with Brendan, the first of the building blocks in constructing a new approach. From the start, it convinced me. It made sense. And although the results weren’t good, I could see that we were playing better. I was excited. Brendan’s philosophy was to play on the floor, keep possession of the ball and, if we lost it, to pressure to get it back. Don’t panic, don’t play so fast as we had the previous season, look for the spaces at the right time.
If I was excited, others were worried. And no, not because of the famous envelopes that appeared during a TV documentary about the club. Mostly, we just joked about that particular episode, but the manager’s methods really worked for us.
For those who didn’t see the documentary, Brendan had got the entire squad together during pre-season soon after he had taken over and showed us three envelopes. He told us that inside each envelope was a piece of paper on which he had written the name of someone who would let the team down during the coming season. It was our duty, he said, to make sure that it wasn’t our name in there. At the end of the year, he would open the envelopes and reveal the names inside. I hadn’t seen a manager do that before and of course afterwards lots of the players were talking about it.
There was a group of us sitting there, and Glen Johnson came over and said: “I know who’s in the envelopes. I know what’s written on all three pieces of paper.” Who? What?
‘“Number 3” . . . “José” . . . and “Enrique”. We fell about. José Enrique protested: “No, no, no, no, inglés – I’m not there, you are!”
We never did find out what was written in those envelopes. It was unusual and I must admit that for a moment I did think: “How can you think before the season has even started that there are three people who are going to let you down? And if there is a name in there and he plays well, and you doubted him, what are you going to do then?’’ I’m sure there were no names, it was just a way of motivating us; a tactic to make sure we gave everything. And in truth it got forgotten pretty quickly.
I was much more interested in the way we were going to play. Others were interested for different reasons. It can be frightening to play like that; it takes nerve. Some centre-backs prefer not to have the ball that often. They prefer not to risk being caught with it. You could see that sometimes the central defenders felt under pressure and wanted to hit it long, but Brendan kept insisting and, gradually, they got used to it.
Slowly they became more comfortable bringing the ball out. We adapted. Danny Agger and Martin Skrtel improved a lot. Technically, they’re fine and they’ve gained more confidence in their ability. They’ve become better players. Before it might be two passes and then hit it long but Brendan has changed that. For that to work, the goalkeeper has to act like another outfield player and right from the start they began to be coached differently too. Confidence came through repetition.
The new style suited me. Playing in England where all the centre-backs are tall and strong, the long punt up the pitch is no good to me, but a quick ball to release me either side of them works well. Mostly, I need the ball on the floor and Brendan knew that and he also worked with me on the movements I could make to isolate defenders. He was confident that if I could take them on one-on-one, I would be likely to beat them. He was keen to play to my strengths and my style suited his.
He knew that I’m a very instinctive player who plays on intuition. He knew that if he put me in as a static number nine, waiting for the wingers to put crosses in, I’d be no good.
Not no good, in fact, but worse than that – I’m not there. He knew that I’m a mobile striker and that a lot of the time you’ll find me outside the area, looking for space, moving. I won’t be there as a target for two wide men to aim crosses at.
Andy Carroll would be, of course. Every coach has his own taste in players and given the type of game that Andy offered, it was natural that Brendan didn’t include him in his plans.
Andy is tall, strong and good in the air. But I think people were wrong about him: he was also technically very good indeed. He can strike a ball very cleanly with his left foot and with so much power. The power he was able to produce always stood out to me in training sessions. It was a shame that injuries reduced the number of times we could play together in our first season at Liverpool.
Yet for a short, passing game in which you’re looking to release people into space with a lot of pace, he doesn’t fit. He wanted to play for England so it was important for him to get games, which meant looking for a way to move on and eventually he joined West Ham on loan. The coach was honest with him, which is always the best way: if you’re not going to select a player, tell him.
Something similar happened with Charlie Adam. Charlie’s passing was good, but it was suited to a longer passing type of game and Brendan wanted shorter, sharper passing and quicker movement.
That shift in style was symbolised by the arrival of Joe Allen from Swansea. Brendan described Joe as the “Welsh Xavi”; it didn’t quite work that way, and that’s some tag to have, but Joe was especially brilliant the first 10 games or so and I thought he was an excellent signing. Brendan knew him really well from their time at Swansea and Joe’s first few games were fantastic. He was very good with the ball, he fitted the philosophy perfectly and defensively he was exceptional; above all, he understood the movements Brendan wanted straight away, while Stevie [Gerrard] and Jordan Henderson began a process of adapting to his style.
With time, they adapted too. In Jordan’s case, the proof came last season. Jordan had changed so much. To start with, maybe he wanted to do too much at once, but he is intelligent and he learned with Brendan in the first year even if he didn’t play much. You watched him the following season and he was playing the passes when he saw them. He was taking his time, he was calmer, cleverer. He learned to understand the movements of Daniel [Sturridge] and me more too, while the shift to a one-touch game suited him. He also rebelled against the critics; maybe they brought out a part of his character that we didn’t know he had. Brendan changed him; he changed us all.
I remembered Rafa Benítez’s Liverpool, which was a team based on being very defensively strong and looking to break, so I didn’t necessarily see the new Liverpool as the recovery of historic values, but soon people were talking about that. I heard fans talking about “pass and move”, the way the great Liverpool sides of the Seventies and Eighties had played.
From my point of view, there was something in that idea of Joe as the Welsh Xavi. I wouldn’t say that we played like Barcelona because it was impossible to emulate the speed, touch and technique of their passing game at the time. But you could see a Spanish influence in the way that Brendan worked. He was interested in Spain, he had studied there, and what he’d learned there was at the heart of our style of play: passing, pressuring high, quick movement, arriving into the area rather than standing there waiting for it, coming inside from wide positions.
It’s not quite that simple, of course. You always have to adapt to your environment. For example, Barcelona wouldn’t be the same in the English league. In Spain they let you play more. The defenders and the midfielders can play but that’s partly because they’re allowed to play. The opponents will come and pressure in the middle of the pitch, but no higher. In England, they pressure you more aggressively, they’re much more on top of you. Barcelona would have to adapt to that. Equally, if you put Liverpool in the Spanish league they would not be the same. When you see a Spanish team play against an English team, you get a glimpse of that: the Spanish team pressures, sure, but it’s different. The English team runs much more, but they often run less intelligently.
Generally, English teams are less well-ordered. Brendan stood out: his tactical work was exceptional while some opponents seemed to do little in this area.
Brendan quickly showed he was adaptable too. Changes were made depending on the opposition. Sometimes, if they only had one up front he would leave three back rather than four and use the full-back to give width and depth to the attack. He also knows that he has to listen to the player, to know what he is comfortable doing, and he’s exceptional at that.
Liverpool are in very good hands with Brendan Rodgers. The way he coached us during my time there was impressive and I am sure that the methods I enjoyed and found so effective will continue to be employed. Everything Brendan does is built towards perfecting the mechanics of football and making adjustments for the next game or to fulfil a particular objective. Although there weren’t any specific instructions to begin with, I knew that as soon as I got into training on Tuesday all the exercises were conditioned by the game the following weekend. It might be a small exercise where we couldn’t yet see what he was working towards, but it was always building towards the match.
He doesn’t explicitly tell players the plans for the game all week long because that would just wear you down and you’d end up switching off. If you came into training on Tuesday and he was already telling us how the opposition’s left-back was going to play then by the Friday we’d all be going mad. So we worked slowly towards the game and then on the Thursday or the Friday, he might say, “they’re weak here” or “they’re vulnerable in this space”. The instructions became more explicit: “Look, if they step up here, you’re faster than them cutting inside”; “They always hold the line and you can run past them”; or “Watch the left-back – he’s the one who reacts slowly and doesn’t step up, playing you onside. He stands watching and doesn’t respond as quickly as the other defenders.”
Sometimes what we worked towards was even more explicitly focused on the opposition. When we faced Andy Carroll again, Brendan had seen that West Ham played the ball to the full-backs who then lofted diagonal balls looking for him. So in training we had Martin Kelly pretending to be Andy, playing like him. We were working against movements that were designed to mimic the way the opposition play.
Brendan didn’t obsess about telling us about opponents constantly, but through working on certain exercises the message seeped into our minds.
