Oliver Kay Chief Football Correspondent, Madrid
Published at 12:01AM, November 4 2014
It takes a certain kind of optimism to suggest right now that an assignment at the Bernabéu, home of the European champions, represents an opportunity for Liverpool rather than a cause for dread. Blind optimism, most would call it, but Brendan Rodgers did his best last night to remind his players of the qualities that got them back to the Champions League group stage in the first place.
The profound worry for Rodgers must be that those qualities — he cited intensity, wonderful football, courage, character and confidence — have been so glaringly absent from Liverpool’s play for much of this campaign to date. The Liverpool of last term would have approached Real Madrid in the belief, misplaced or otherwise, that they could get a result. On present form, you cannot help but fear for them against Cristiano Ronaldo and company.
Another concern, perhaps, is of the damage that could be done to Liverpool if they cannot somehow produce a performance this week to quell the growing sense of unrest around the club, particularly if a chastening result occurred with a questionable team selection.
Any team selection is questioned and damned when a team slip up these days, of course, but the plan to rest Steven Gerrard, even if based on logic, will no doubt be held against Rodgers by some unless the gamble pays spectacular and unexpected dividends.
The tests are coming thick and fast for Liverpool. Tonight it is Real at the Bernabéu. On Saturday lunchtime it is Chelsea at Anfield. They have struggled often enough this season against moderate sides, most recently Newcastle United on Saturday, to raise concern that they could be taken apart by two of the very strongest teams in Europe.
“They have all facets to their game,” Rodgers said of Real. “They have the quality to play through you and then they also have that incredible speed on the counterattack. You have to ensure your team is super-compact, that your lines are close together. When you go forward, you do so in the correct [way] and you can’t leave yourself naively open on the counterattack because you have [Karim] Benzema and Ronaldo who stay up and you have [James] Rodríguez and [Gareth] Bale breaking through, so very quickly you are going to have four players against your back four or three.”
Do Liverpool have the personnel or even the know-how to combat that kind of attacking threat? Even at their best last season, when of course they had Luis Suárez taking the game to the opposition, they were hardly renowned for their mastery of the art of defending.
Rodgers resents the suggestion that his team cannot defend. “We have conceded 13 goals this season [in the Barclays Premier League],” he said. “Chelsea, who have a super squad, have conceded ten. Arsenal and Manchester City about the same, Tottenham and Manchester United more. The frustration has been the mistakes. That’s something we have to eradicate, but there certainly haven’t been too many times we’ve been outdone.
“Our defence has come in for a bit of criticism, over the organisation, but for me it’s a collective thing. The key for us is having that intensity high up the field, which sparks off the way we defend as a team. When you have an attacking philosophy, you’re going to be more susceptible because you’re not with nine players sitting behind the ball the whole time. We have to eradicate the mistakes — that’s something we’re very much aware of — but we want to retain our attacking philosophy.”
The problem is that, without the departed Suárez and the injured Daniel Sturridge and without the confidence and momentum that swept them so close to the Barclays Premier League title last spring, Liverpool have sorely lacked that dynamic. Both with and without the ball — and they are likely to be without it for long periods tonight against Luka Modric, Toni Kroos and Isco, who hopes to keep the fit-again Bale out of the starting line-up — they have struggled lately.
That struggle for confidence, cohesion and much else is part of the reason why Gerrard has been retained in the starting line-up so often rather than being rested. To rest him against Real would be a risk in tactical terms but perhaps a greater one in PR terms. Real would be hot favourites whether he was playing or not, but to leave out the captain in favour of a rusty Lucas Leiva or Emre Can would be a move that would play into the hands of Rodgers’s growing army of doubters if it backfired.
It was interesting Rodgers should speak of the “awful lot of money” the club spent this summer on players — Emre, Lazar Markovic, Adam Lallana, Mario Balotelli — whom he has to give “the opportunity to perform”. “If at the end of this cycle of games, they haven’t performed, they can never say they haven’t been given a chance,” he said.
It is, then, an opportunity for some of those players and, beyond that, for Liverpool to try to recover some lost pride and belief as they look to recover from a difficult start in group B. It is an opportunity, though, that it is hard to imagine them taking. A different kind of optimist may suggest of their recent ills that, in view of the fixture list, things may get worse before they get better.
Rodgers seems to be reverting to the old habits that really maddened me in his first season: constant buck pushing and coded snipes at his own squad. That quote -
“If at the end of this cycle of games, they haven’t performed, they can never say they haven’t been given a chance” - is a real classic.
You bought them, Brendan, or so you said, so don't act now as if you're a sceptical onlooker getting ready to bomb them back out of the club. One minute they're great prospects, handpicked, who'll be fantastic once they've been given time to settle in, the next they're just some bunch of misfits who are on trial before a manager who sounds like he doesn't trust them. Beneath all those hugs and pats there's a vulnerable little man who'll stab anyone in the back if it looks like protecting his position.
