adminLONDON. — Rarely are you inclined to offer sympathy towards anyone successful in the ruthless world of football, given the rhino-hide skin required to achieve it.
Yet if sympathy isn’t the right response for the position Brendan Rodgers finds himself in this morning, then you can at least empathise with the anger, frustration and hurt the Liverpool manager must be feeling right now.
Luis Suarez’s comments on Tuesday went beyond the usual cynical utterances we are all wearily accustomed to, as footballers play their idiotic games to ensure they can grasp the object of their latest desire — which is almost always yet more money, as though they haven’t already got enough of it.
The South American’s toddler tantrum attacks were personal, accusing his manager of amongst other thing, “lying” . . . which is pretty rich coming from a man who was found by an FA disciplinary to have seriously distorted the truth with inconsistencies while offering testimony against racism charges.
We can go into the rights of wrongs of what Suarez is doing to force himself out of Anfield, but really, what is the point?
He is a spoilt man-child, no doubt indulged to the point of never having to face adult responsibility so of course he is going to temper tantrum his way towards what he wants.
And Liverpool must have surely known that was what they were getting when they signed him from Ajax. He had gone on strike to force a move to the Dutch club (after mistakenly believing his contract had allowed him a transfer, it is important to note).
He arrived at Anfield in the middle of a ban for biting an opponent, suggesting he wanted to move to England because he felt unjustly vilified back in Holland. It is easy now to join the dots, but let’s face it they were plenty big enough back then to identify without reading glasses.
So Liverpool must have known this was coming, the moment the Uruguayan opened his mouth at the end of the last season, to suggest he needed to get away from England because he was, wait for it, . . . sick of being unjustly persecuted. Though of course, those particular goalposts have changed, and Arsenal’s large contract offer seems miraculously to have eased the poor lamb’s hurt feelings.
They probably deserve much of what they get as well, because they knowingly signed a man with such a checkered past, and such a potentially explosive future (and he didn’t disappoint in that regard, did he?), and then kept him when all logic suggested he was toxic waste that needed to be disposed of.
Rodgers though, wasn’t the manager who bought him, nor was he the manager who so sadly put his wonderful reputation on the line to defend the indefensible when Suarez took football to new depths with his ugly, primeval racism against Patrice Evra.
He was simply a manager who took a tainted footballer, worked with the flawed raw materials he inherited, and turned him into a much better player (even if he clearly couldn’t turn him into a much better man).
Perhaps the single biggest reason you have to feel a certain loathing for Suarez is derived from this point. He was a talented player when he came to Anfield, and before Rodgers arrived, he had a good record.
It wasn’t a great one though, because he missed a helluva lot of chances for a top player — and the fact he seemed to need six or seven openings for every goal perhaps kept him outside the truly top class bracket.
Without doubt, that changed last season, as a mere glimpse at his stats shows irrefutably. He scored 29 goals in 41 games — a world class strike rate. Why? Well, his manager created a system tailored around the striker’s assets, instead of asking him to work around a system that wasn’t. The system introduced by Rodgers created as many chances for Suarez, but in different areas, asking him to utilise different skills and techniques in taking them . . . and no longer was he so profligate.
It may seem bizarre to a layman, but Suarez is not suited to trying instinctively to convert knock-downs. He is no Robbie Fowler, he is not a natural born finisher. So Andy Carroll was jettisoned — despite the obvious embarrassment to the club, because of the ridiculous price they paid — and the ball was offered to the South American in different parts of the penalty area, and in different ways.
You can’t argue: it worked, he had his best ever season . . . by a mile. He has gone from being very good to world class; last season his status rocketed to join the elite of international football and was rightly mentioned in the same breath as Bale, Van Persie and even Messi and Ronaldo. — Daily Mirror.
Online Reporter